question about HA in PG 9.0

Hi Everybody,
I am doing a bit of research about High Availability solutions offered as part of core in Postges 9.0, I have couple of questions, sorry if they expose my novice status where it comes to HA on Postgres:

1. The doc is lovely but all of the examples are for linux, has anyone tired a Hot Standby streaming scenario on windows? Any issues specific to windows? I know that linux and windows environments "should" behave the same but actually running in both of those environments exposes many differences.

2. I am reading the Beta4 doc where under section 25.3 Failover it says:
"PostgreSQL does not provide the system software required to identify a failure on the primary and notify the standby database server. Many such tools exist and are well integrated with the operating system facilities required for successful failover, such as IP address migration."
I have been reading up on this issue most notably on http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Shared_Storage, where the suggestions have been gravitating to solutions on the physical level.
Are there any software level solutions? ( I have a feeling that this may be a stupid question, but I want to implement this in the cloud, and not potentially kill an ami instance)
I found a presentation by Heikki Linnakangas where he mentions: Heartbeat and Shoot the other Node in the head as types of 3rd party high availability tools, does anyone have any recommendations of specific software packages?

Thank you,
Sincerely,
Kasia