The entire Windows 8 roll-out was a palpably desperate effort to leverage Microsoft's existing desktop monopoly to gain a hold on what was/is seen as "the future of computing" tablets and phones.
Microsoft did very badly. But this kind of thing is hard to do and is not a one product or an incremental-product-improvements affair.
When Microsoft was fighting for it desktop monopoly, it did a good job of leveraging it's strengths to produce products that were "bad" by many measures but which satisfied a lot of user requirements and offered the end user good value. Surface is a logical product in this long lineage (and in answer to the parent's question, you can't create a Frankenstein product like Surface with focus group because Surface had to be a "quantum leap", an ad-hoc product of bucket chemistry). The problem is that apparently either the tablet market is not fluid enough that a product can win by just being a bucket of feature or Google already muscled into the feature-side and Microsoft isn't getting that part.
And equally, until now, Microsoft didn't actually sh-t all over their basic UI. But the approach of removing the start button subtracted more existing users than "Metro" could hope to gain.
You could frame this affair by saying that not only did MS' greed not abate over the years, it grew large enough to strangle the beast. Couldn't have happened to nicer people.