Shelter is the most important asset. Find a place to hunker down and ride out the storm. Fire if you can build one, but in 40+ mph winds that going to be real tricky.
If your "shelter" has 40mph winds blowing through it, fire isn't going to help anyway. OTOH, short of finding yourself on flat rock or solid ice, it's pretty hard for someone experienced in finding and/or making a shelter to not come up with something better than that using only normal survival gear. Dig a hole, burrow into the snow, crawl under a boulder, whatever it takes to get out of that weather until it clears up enough to look for or make a better shelter. At a rough guess, I'd say 80% of the volume of my winter 72 hour kit is shelter-related. A lot of that is multi-purpose, but I'm comfortable with relegating other tasks to only a fifth of the space when the weather warrants.
For summer, (here) I sometimes drop some of the shelter in favor of more water and/or water procurement, because the main shelter concerns become simply shade during the day and mosquito protection at night, with some provision for a rain cover for the occasional cold rain. (Otherwise, 80F overnight lows don't really make hypothermia an issue, and I've been in a few small summer storms here that were warm enough to make a very comfortable shower.) When I travel, I also alter the kit for the areas I'll be travelling through. (Usually by adding another bag, since I still want my "local" gear in case something happens in the first 150-200 miles.) If I were planning to be in an area where being stuck out in the middle of a huge expanse of solid rock or ice sheet would be a definite possibility, that would also warrant some significant gear changes, like a cold weather bivy sack, properly rated mummy bag and some rock/ice climbing gear.
What it boils down to is knowing some basic information about the area you're going into, the expected weather, and your personal limits.
