They are doing the same with Windows that they did with Office. Win12 will come as either one time purchase or subscription based but over the course of 10 years they’ll push harder and harder on getting people into the subscription version. Once it has enough uptake, and it will get there, they will then start pushing the “Why run it on local hardware when you can put it in our cloud and access it from anywhere?”.
They’re already doing the Virtual Desktop thing in both M365 and Azure now so it’ll be a pretty easy transition when comes.