As for use cases, how about: it's a tablet, without the regular complexities of 'tablet mode'. It runs the same stuff as your desktop, acts, smells, barks and looks just like your desktop, and if you want to use it like a crippled toy in the style of an iPad, you're free to use the metro apps.
Let us also not be too quick to forget that Microsoft were the first to seriously meld the desktop and tablet experience. They're the only company (out of two runners, really) with a serious story in this department. Waiting with bated breath to see if Apple wholesale copies the Microsoft approach, toy-apps-as-start-button works wonderfully.
> it's a tablet, without the regular complexities
> of 'tablet mode'
> It runs the same stuff as your desktop, acts, smells, barks and looks just like your desktop
> if you want to use it like a crippled toy in the style of an iPad
> Microsoft were the first to seriously meld the desktop and tablet experience
> Waiting with bated breath to see if Apple wholesale copies the Microsoft approach,
> toy-apps-as-start-button works wonderfully.
The end result is that an on-screen keyboard or gesture input is just as capable of driving desktop software, and it's been that way for a very long time. If any aspect of the experience is suboptimal, it would be tiny widget sizes that are unaccommodating to thumb-sized input. But that's covered by inclusion of a stylus.
Asus has touchscreen laptops for less than half of the price, and convertible laptops have been around for at least a decade.
Convertible laptops were 5lb monstrosities that were nearly impossible to hand hold, emitted tremendous amounts of heat, had incredibly poor battery life, and infamous reliability issues that came from a mechanically complex transformation mechanism. They also used resistive touch screens that were easy to damage, required frequent recalibration when heavily used, and were difficult to use with fingers (making the devices almost exclusively stylus-based devices).
So no, the modern incarnation of the tablet (in the way that iPad has defined it) is nothing like the tablet of old. In fact, if you look at the new convertible tablets coming out of OEMs, they've come pretty far too: capacitive screens, solid construction, hugely reduced weight, unbelievably lower heat output, and battery life that actually matters. We're also seeing novel new ways of building convertibles (e.g., separating keyboard from screen entirely) that make the devices far more realistic for handheld use.
The big secret to tablets that Apple realized, and other companies are slowly picking up on is the importance of the screen. Old convertible laptops used the absolute worst screens that had limited viewing angles, demonstrated ugly moire and discoloration on taps/presses, along with a slew of heat output and power consumption problems. Compare with the calibrated, accurate, brilliant IPS panels that now inhabit tablets (both Surface and iPad have IPS panels), they are worlds apart. When you're putting together a mobile device that is going to be oriented this way and that in someone's hands, a shitty LCD panel really doesn't cut it.
And the problem with Asus and their "half price" touchscreen laptops is all in the screen.
MS is going to have to work really hard to convince people that the surface is worth $900, at least in my opinion.
Are they full HD resolution? Do they have an active digitizer? Core i5 ?
People thought the RT was slightly heavy to hold as a tablet. Will be interested to see their opinions of this.