Somewhere in Redmond, I'm sure the are working versions of Access, Publisher, Vizio, et al running on Windows RT. You can't really port only parts of Office and not others. The decision to limit Windows RT to the "core" Office apps seems largely
a business/marketing decision. (I think the story with Outlook on ARM, which was initially withheld, then finally released due to customer demand, is the best evidence for that.)
Not having at least the Access Runtime available for Windows RT is shortsighted I feel. My wife is a partner in a small business that uses Access and they are considering using Office 365 / SharePoint Online to host split databases to be accessed with existing
Access/VBA front-end apps. The sad part is, I can get the Access front-end running on her partner's MacBook Air (via Windows on Parallels), but not on my wife's Surface 2. It's like Microsoft is trying to undermine its own platform on ARM by eliminating
the natural reasons people would consider a Surface 2 tablet over the iPad.
For what it's worth, on our home office LAN I have a server VM running Windows 7 Ultimate with a home-grown RemoteApp setup so that she can run Access, Publisher, and other desktop apps on her Surface. It's not practical to do that remotely, though, as VPN
options are limited on Windows RT and robust connections are just not always available.
