At present, to import any MDT (Mechanical Desktop) data into Inventor you need MDT installed alongside Inventor. The last version of MDT was 2009 and thus is now no longer officially supported. With new operating systems being released (e.g. the recent Windows 8) we need a way for a long term solution to importing/using old MDT data as there will come a time that MDT can either no longer be authorized/registered or even usable on a new OS. Why cannot MDT import code be incorporated into Inventor, much like all the recent SolidWorks/Catia/Pro-Eng import routines?
We all knew about MDT's termination long before the 2009 release (and, in my company's case, we had moved over to Inventor well before then) - but it doesn't ignore the fact that products are still being built using drawings created by MDT and thus we still have MDT data on the system (hell, we still build some products from hand-drawn drawings, designed prior to CAD).
I am sure we are not unique in our need to preserve our long-term accessability to our legacy data and hope Autodesk can allow long-term customers a way to open MDT data from Inventor.