I moved off of windows long before surfaces, not going back. Funny story, a few months ago we needed to setup an office windows 11 laptop (as part of a software project).
It used to be you could just boot the machine, cleanup bloatware, install some antivirus (after figuring out which one has not currently become adware), install basic applications, a copy of office, configure an email client or outlook (which is a nightmare to setup itself, with its weird mail folders that you can create but then can't delete without obscure windows voodoo because they become default windows mail folders or something...what the actual f!).
Anyway, so I give this machine to a junior dev to setup, and some time later he comes to me saying he can't even get to the desktop screen because an online windows account is needed. I think, surely this can't be true because a month earlier we had done the same thing on the same windows version, on the same laptop model. So I tried and guess what, I could not. I googled, and there were all these tricks you could try to make the "create offline account" option appear, but it never did, so I had to create a throwaway windows account, with a real email alias, go through all the "confirm your email" steps, in order to access a computer that was just purchased. I even tried removing all network access and restarting, no luck. See related rant by me here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34983448
If I could not set it up with an offline account, imagine a non techie, buys a laptop, goes somewhere with no network, tries to get work done and finds out it's impossible because of some dark pattern war that Microsoft is waging on it's customers.
So no, problem is not just hardware, or how well this one machine runs windows X, Y, or Z. It is the fact that a person can't just walk into a store, buy a windows PC that is being sold (at whatever price point) and trust that it will enable them to do work, consistently, on the short, medium and long term with little to no additional IT effort.