Microsoft needs to do its own hardware, and it needs to copy Apple's focus on the fundamentals as much as possible. I think Surface RT really gives you a glimmer of what's possible, but they made some mistakes with it. On one hand, the industrial design is there. It's a beautiful product, light, thin, and doesn't look like a rip-off of an Apple product. The guts have some key design mistakes (Tegra 3 just isn't up to the task, a $500 tablet with a Retina screen is inexcusable), but that's something they can fix in the next revision. On the other hand, they're not copying Apple enough. Surface RT has a great pitch: it'll run Office. That's it's fundamental feature. Given that, it should have been perfectly executed. Instead, it shipped as a desktop-mode app with some touch facilities grafted on, and it shipped with performance problems that all the reviewers noted (even if it was somewhat alleviated with a later patch). Apple never would have shipped a product where the #1 feature of the device was so unpolished. Shipping late would've been far preferable to shipping "on time" with a product that further damaged the brand.