Office XP was a "toy"? Office 2003? The SoC in the Surface is as capable (and in many ways more capable) than the commodity computers of that era.
At what point exactly do you believe office stopped being a toy?
At what point exactly do you believe office stopped being a toy?
Besides the version that was tested with was a beta. The final version of office runs smoothly on the device. So what is your point? RTFA!
However, porting a userland application to a new architecture of roughly equal capability is not a major engineering accomplishment. There is significant work to be done in the compiler, in the OS kernel and libraries, and I don't mean to detract from that at all. Well-written application code (especially code for productivity apps that generally doesn't make heavy use of processor-specific features like vector ISAs) should require minimal change.
My point is simply that office should not tax the capabilities of the SoC at all, and that getting it to run isn't a major feat of engineering in itself; no limits are being pushed here. I'm not saying that Microsoft hasn't done a good job, or that Office sucks on the Surface. I'm just trying to have some perspective.
Mythbuster's argument just isn't making sense to me.