It's an excellent tablet, I love having the keyboard when I need to compose emails or edit spec documents for work when I'm on the go, it has great battery life, the Kindle and Netflix applications are better experiences than their iOS counterparts (on the iPad), and the app selection is actually pretty decent for my use cases.
A few apps are beautiful and smooth, but most frequently pause and stutter (for example switching between inboxes in the mail app locks up the UI for seconds) and few third-party apps use the modern UI design language well. The actual app selection is abysmal. I really want to like the tablet and held out hope that Windows 8.1 would fix some of the underlying problems but it turned out to be minor update in functionality.
My wife's iPad was cheaper, is always smooth and has a great selection of apps.
Last time I was in a conference, I talked with a Microsoft guy who was happy to see I had a Surface RT. He told me I was the first person he saw at a conference with that device (or a Pro). I was pretty surprised.
So where did Microsoft screw up? Marketing?
Maybe they shouldn't say it's a tablet.
If it won't run ported Win32 code there is no compelling reason to get it over an iPad or Android tablet. It's effectively a Windows tablet that doesn't run Windows apps. iPad and Android don't run Windows apps either, but they both have more and better software than the Windows Store and will probably continue to do so for some years to come. OTOH imagine if you could actually use that "Desktop" app to run useful software ported from x86. It might have some of the appeal of the Surface Pro.
(Full disclosure: I worked in the Windows division during Win8 development. I left the company in 2011.)
But where you are spot-on is for old games: the ARM has got enough punch to run them and it would turn the RT into an old game portable console.
The other thing that isn't very great is Windows Media Player. It's painful to browse files from a NAS for example.
So a couple of rough edges, but overall, really great.
Another problem is messaging - it's very hard to concisely describe Windows RT's role in a way that people can grasp. It doesn't run legacy software, but it does run Office. Is it a laptop, or a tablet, or what?