This isn't a tablet competitor, it's an ultraportable competitor.
e: made a bit more concrete
And like those early smartphones, it's got some growing to do. But the market it's trying to carve out strikes me as a real one with real demand. I'm surprised we're not seeing more doctors and other specialists-on-the-go wielding them.
Much like the HTC Dream was basically a first generation joke, I'm hopeful and very much intend to be carrying one of Surface's offspring in my backpack in a few years time.
I'm excited to see what comes of the Ubuntu tablet distro, but at the same time, they were the ones who made Unity, which isn't really good at anything. So I'm not super optimistic either.
Windows's "metro" UI is obviously touch friendly, but even the desktop can be made touch friendly-ish via its DPI scaling, which I think works pretty well. I haven't been able to get that same usability out of any Linux desktop environment yet. (If someone has, I'd love to know about it!)
I hope Jolla and Sailfish will help in that department.
I'm surprised every single doctor in a hospital doesn't own one of these yet, for example.
And now it's too heavy to carry around all day every day.
And from what I've heard and used, both the touch and type cover aren't "awful" or "terrible". They're not 'good' either, but I'd certainly put them in the 'usuable' category. Would I write a book on it? Hell no, but I'd also be tempted to swap my mac's chiclet keyboard for a mechanical keyboard anyhow. There is certainly room for improvement, but people in HN seem to have an particularly high disdain for the surface's covers... they're not the demon they're made out to be.
If the products competing here are $1000 ultra-protables with pretty great keyboards and $1000 tablets with crappy keyboards, which has the bigger audience?
What is the most accessible creative occupation? Writing? STEM fields? Or drawing? We could draw before the written word existed. We could write before we created more abstracted languages like modern symbolic math.
I think the end game is to include high resolution, precise, accurate stylus input, a'la Wacom technology or something like it.
I cry a little every time I see a Microsoft product with Wacom built in and an equivalent Apple product without it. What I'd really like is something like a Surface 2 running Ubuntu or SuSE, but with an Apple-worthy battery life.
But it has, admittedly, a better shot at doing it than anything else that came before it.
There have definitely been many microsoft products I've seen that were incredibly impressive, but were simply not taken the rest of the way.
Maybe a 3rd party manufacturer can take where the surface is now, and provide that polish, which I think was the goal of the surface anyways. Show what is possible to 3rd parties and let them take the ball the rest of the way. If that can happen, then the surface will have done its job.
It's all a perfect storm of bad decisions the reason why Surface itself has bad battery life.
[1] - http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/10/why-does-windows-ha...
In the Surface's defense, it is running a wacom digitizer over a 1080p IPS display. Not only is it pushing 2x the pixels as the 11" MBA, but it's doing it over IPS (up to 15% greater power consumption according to Wiki).
But yes, Windows has much poorer battery life, my speculation is that since Apple targets their hardware to a few small (comparatively) number of hardware permutations, they can take this to their advantage, and power-optimize the shit out of everything.
Here's a question complaining about 1/2 battery life for ubuntu, and an answerer said they were able to match the battery life by using proprietary drivers. http://askubuntu.com/questions/158778/why-does-ubuntu-have-a...
See http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-HD-Graphics-4600.86106.0.... and http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-HD-Graphics-5000.91978.0....
Although, that said the Surface Pro 2 actually has an HD 4400 which is definitely inferior to the HD 5000, though the difference is not that really huge (probably roughly 20% overall), which in most cases is not enough to make a difference in playability of games - if you're getting 25fps average on the HD 4400, 30fps on the HD 5000 will be noticeably better but still bad IMO, especially in high load scenarios when the framerate dips. Personally I prefer to play with over a 60fps average so that even in more intense scenes it doesn't drop to below 30fps.
And if you're not playing games, it's really not even relevant.
(edit to correct incorrect autocorrect on ... iPad ;-)
I'll agree that most of the market doesn't want that kind of form factor, but two segments in which the convertable tablet has really taken off are in the education and health care industries. I work with a few schools that manage to hand out tablet + stylus + keyboard laptops to all of their students and do pretty well with it.
My school isn't a fan of the Surface due to serviceability issues (non-replaceable battery being a big one) and that it is a great tablet, but gives up some ground in the general-use laptop area to do that. The other schools in our group share the same sort of sentiments.