Most of the students I know at my university get maybe 3 hours on their laptops and many have Wacom tablets to write notes with. Most classrooms have plugs now. Writing directly onto the screen is a big value proposition for many of these students. I wouldn't count it out yet.

And I am sure it will be even less popular than a certain laptop that had less than 4 hours battery life and didn't even have a touch screen but it fit in a manila envelope (MacBook air)

> What the heck is anyone going to do with a tablet that is (over)priced like an ultrabook and has only 4 hours of battery life?

I might be getting too old to understand this but when I was an undergraduate student 14 years ago, I had an 1-hour-battery laptop and was 'really' useful. I can't see how a portable computer (even if I have to plug it to use it) would be 'especially useless' for students.

Coming from a latin-american country, the whole battery life issue sounds a lot like a "1st world problem" to me.

Haswell will fix what? The battery life? Because that's a no. You might see some marginal improvement, but that's about it.