Rockford Lhotka has a blog entry in which he points out the 'interesting' history of DOS, Windows and .Net. He is 'predicting' that one day Windows will run on .Net and not the other way around.
http://www.lhotka.net/WeBlog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=95cadf4f-53bb-4a65-8a2c-45f0fca882cb
Interesting way of thinking of it.