I want a sketchpad, handwriting recognition, the ability to insert audio clips and videos and images, OCR for text in those images... in fact let me take a photo, paste it in and then extract the text in the photo... quick text tools with basic formatting... and all of this should be searchable, shareable, integrated.
That's OneNote.
On the desktop I always felt OneNote was being held back. It begged and screamed for a tablet to bring it alive.
The only thing that makes the Surface compelling for me is: Does it have a full-featured OneNote?
Unfortunately the reality is that OneNote falls short just a little.
Surface has OneNote MX which is a version of OneNote that doesn't have feature parity with the desktop version.
And that sucks, as if it did Microsoft would have me buying a Windows OS once again, just for that application.
It will really be a shame if it's not featured full-featured on Slate.
I want to be wrong, but nothing on the Microsoft site (or anywhere else I've seen) shows me a side-by-side compare of the features of OneNote for every platform and version.
What I've read is that OneNote is available for Surface, but it's a feature limited version. No real details on what features are limited or missing.
The main thing missing from OneNote is audio/video recording and searching, though you can insert audio/video files from elsewhere.
But the jailbreaks will come sooner or later, anyway.
edit: oh, you speaked about x86 version. Well I would guess this will have higher energy consumption and be less compelling as a tablet.
(Not that I completely disagree - AD integration would certainly be a massive additional advantage, I just don't think it's critical).
If this is the case, it makes the office integration less of a selling point.