It'll reduce hardware requirements so that lower cost hardware can also be used in Windows 8.1 systems.
Trying to catch the XP users ?
All very interesting, are they starting to listen after getting panned - win8.x, still under 10% OS market share and even worse than the initial Vista take up and we know what a lemon that was. Though I don't know if it was ever a hardware issue stopping many XP users from upgrading. Businesses are still heavy XP users and for them it is all productivity/retraining staff.
I see more pushing/revelations for windows 9.0 (2015 possibly even this year) in the media now than windows 8.2 update.