I can understand this product from the point of view of someone who spends most of the day on the road, but still needs to use their windows business software (common windows only sales software, etc). This is the identical market to the ultrabook/netbook segment. The ultrabooks would generally have better text input, while this surface pro tablet would have slightly better battery life and be lighter and easier to carry around (but not by much, really). Not too bad a product at all for this, and should get a number of sales from business users within a few years when it has been tried and tested by daring others in the respective companies.

However, from any other POV, this product seems to fall flat. Unless you have to, nobody is going to use a win32 app on a tablet if they can use a similar iPad app designed for touch. Nobody will give up the battery life of a real tablet for the difficult to use win32 stylus programs, and the win8 apps just aren't there yet. So this device will fail to compete in the tablet sector for the identical reasons the RT tablet did not compete. It's just not as good a tablet for tablet uses as an iPad.

Obviously it won't compete in the desktop/high end laptop segment, it's just not capable enough.

I don't see this device being any kind of success in the short term, but with revisions and company deals it may be able to corner the mobile business market in future - a very large market - if it survives that long with the politics at Microsoft and is able to reduce the price to compete with current budget business laptops.