Part of Windows 7 is a completely new platform for Location and Sensors. This is a framework that tries to remove the old legacy of COM-ports for communication with external devices. Even a lot of today's USB devices, still rely on the COM protocol to communicate with the PC. The Location and Sensor Platform in Windows 7 improves this with a modern architecture for arbitrary hardware sensory input.
One of the most important advances in this platform is the ability for multiple applications to use the same sensors at the same time, this has always been some of a problem with GPS, where only one instance of the application could read the GPS coordinates.
