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Here’s what Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer revealed about Windows 7 at All Things Digital a few minutes ago. The biggest “feature” is the touch and multi-touch integration, which takes many of its roots from Microsoft’s Surface Table, and will be available as an interface options for other apps. Here’s some more stuff they pulled out, which we captured in photos here.

• There will be a OSX-like dock, though how OS X-like is yet to be seen.
• Multi-touch gestures in photogalleries like two-finger zoom, flicking, and panning. Think of the photo app on the Microsoft Surface table.
• Multi-touch paint program where you can draw with 10 fingers (again, think of what you’ve already seen in Surface)
• Multi-touch piano app
• In-depth mapping application that pulls from Microsoft’s Live Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth

Looks like a LOT of the multi-touch features were culled from the Surface team, and the non-touch features look fairly similar to what’s already in Vista (based on the video above). Those apps are demo apps only, and will be revised/rewritten/reworked before the final version of Windows 7 is available. All this will be yours in about 18 months.

For years Microsoft has been investing in many forms of natural input in order to simplify the way people interact with their PC’s and devices. The advent of the original Windows graphical user interface forever changed the way people used their PC’s. Today, advances in pen and handwriting technology in Windows Vista offers students a natural and intuitive way to capture searchable notes and diagrams in the classroom. Others are using this technology to quietly capture pen based notes during meetings. Speech recognition, something which was once considered science fiction, is enabling many Windows Vista users to see, hear, and use their computers for the very first time.

Last year, at the Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital conference, Bill Gates introduced a groundbreaking new computing experience called Surface. Surface harnesses touch and multi-touch capabilities to provide users with a natural way to interact directly with computing devices.  Expect to see the table-like Surface devices in hotels, retail establishments, restaurants and public entertainment venues.

Touch is quickly becoming a common way of directly interacting with software and devices. Touch-enabled surfaces are popping up everywhere including laptop touch pads, cell phones, remote controls, GPS devices, and more. What becomes even more compelling is when this experience is delivered to the PC -on a wide variety of Windows notebooks, in all-in-one PC’s, as well as in external monitors. In working with our broad ecosystem of hardware and software manufactures, we’re excited to be showing some of the great work and investments we are working on in Windows 7.