Longhorn is a Big CLR Interpreter?

ACM Queue is running an article entitled Longhorn Ties Platform Apps to Core Operating System, which provides a rather fast overview of the Longhorn deliverables, all placed into a table. Of course, this is mostly old news. The only twist that is either new or I did not realize is that Longhorn is now going to be just a huge CLR interpreter, which will protect users from hardware and architecture implementation details, effectively giving each application a sandbox to work in by itself, similar to Java. The only true difference from Java is the fact that CLR is not part of the core operating system, similar to how Mozilla is not part of the core operating system but Internet Explorer is. I suppose that all the security patches in the past bit have not yet sunk in to keep things out of the core operating system...