It's fairly clear to me, from the rushed event, to the complete lack of specs and the hands-off demo approach, that Surface is very much a Beta product at this stage.
It's disappointing, but I can understand why Michaelsoft would want to keep hush about any sort of specs - because they likely haven't been finalized at all yet, and the device probably still crashes a fair bit.
No problem with Microsoft keeping the device hands off. The problem is with a tech site regurgitating a press release while claiming first hand knowledge of the product that they haven't used.