If it is to be an "online-only" OS then it is going to fail miserably. Lots of critical corporate networks are not online at all, so NT4 or Win2K will just have to do and MS will miss out on some of their most valuable sales.
However this is all speculation. We'll only know how it will actually behave once it is released, and shortly thereafter undesireable features will be hacked, no matter how far they go to try and prevent that.