Where's the feel good story about the coder, the gamer, or the office junkie? Each of which makes up a considerably larger slice of the premium laptop/tablet marketplace.
Not make or break maybe. Be a potentially big market - hella yeah.
The majority of design-ish people I know, including myself, would kill for a decent tablet drawing environment. Folk are already laying out for specialist devices like http://www.wacom.com/en/gb/creative/cintiq-24-hd-touch.
My iPad is cute and useful for many things. I do very rough sketch stuff on it. For professional deign work it's pretty much useless. As somebody who's been buying Apple kit since before Jobs return the surface is the first time I've ever been tempted by Windows hardware.
I know many folk who walk around with a Macbook + iPad + wacom tablet. I can see a lot of those folk switching if the Surface 3 worked well. I know lots of long-term Apple folk who were really tempted by the Surface 2.
The office junkies, coders and games have alternatives. Currently there is almost nothing that does what the Surface 2/3 do, on the design side, in a single device.
(I also imagine that the issues of stylus sensitivity & lag will apply to other interaction models to. Getting those things to feel "natural" is non-trivial. Pleasing the design folk will probably make it better for other peeps too.)
I don't know if there's a legitimate marketing reason for this, but it's a tremendously symbolic conflict. Microsoft attacking Apple in their stronghold.
Seeing Apple's huge success in the late 2000s, Microsoft's grand marketing strategy since has been to try and re approach a young hip, artistic audience while not losing their traditional base.
It's a huge shift and it won't be easy, since managers who buy for their offices want a low-rent, predictable product and their feathers are easily ruffled.
I took it back because the SP3 news dropped that week.
Kind of regretting that now.
If they get Gabe happy with it, then they will get a ton of free PR in front of a lot of gamers. For example, see this post of his (especially the second half) about the original surface pro: http://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2013/02/22/the-ms-surf...
I assume anyone from Penny Arcade has a gaming background too.