Good news for Windows 7. Chuck Walbourn has announced on his blog that Windows 7 is getting a Direct X 11.1 update. This is a partial update :
http://blogs.msdn.co...-windows-7.aspx

Copied directly from his blog :

Here is a quick summary of what KB 2670838 adds to Windows 7 Service Pack 1 / Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1:
? ID3D11Device1, ID2D1Factory1, IDWriteFactory1, IDXGIFactory2, IWICImagingFactory2, ID3DUserDefinedAnnotation and related APIs are available. Methods that depend on WDDM 1.2 drivers or new Windows Store app APIs are not supported.
? Improved Direct3D 11 device interoperability via ID3DDeviceContextState, including the improved interop with Direct2D/DirectWrite
D3D11_FEATURE_DATA_D3D9_OPTIONS feature detection
? In addition to the new Windows 8 WIC features, this update also fixes decoding of 96bpp floating-point TIFF images.

All other features of DirectX 11.1 are Windows 8 / Windows Server 2012 only.
And there is more information here : http://support.micro...8?wa=wsignin1.0
The update is currently at Pre-Release : http://www.microsoft...s.aspx?id=35661

Agreed, Windows 7 is a popular and viable OS, it should absolutely have the full direct X. Win RT has it's own selling points beyond Direct X, they don't need to put Direct X on the hook as well. I'm happy they've done at least this, maybe we will see some further updates down the track. I wonder what pressure if any the graphics vendors are putting on Microsoft ?

Improved Direct3D 11 device interoperability via ID3DDeviceContextState, including the improved interop with Direct2D/DirectWrite

This alone for me has made this update worth it :D

EDIT: Just tested with SharpDX, theres some interesting debug messages now at least for D2D, if an object isnt disposed after the app closes (EVEN if it has been disposed with destructor) the process hangs and VS needs restarting, fortunately this worked out in my favour as I spotted a memory leak that must have been present for 6+ ish months, previous debug messages were not as good despite debuglevels being identical, visually it works flawlessly and faster now though.