So here I am at Starbucks doing some quick work. This is, obviously, not something you'd do with an iPad. You never see people with tablets at Starbucks. It's either they're messing with their phone while waiting or they have, more commonly, various MacBooks.
What is making MS Surface so great for me is that while I can use it as a tablet, though not as good as my iPad, it is much more practical to lug around than my 11 inch MacBook Air. Is makes a much better light computing device for me than my MacBook Air.
Part of the appeal is the keyboard. It is flat on the surface of the table. I don't know how many millimeters thick it is but it's trivial. It makes it a much nicer device for typing, something the traditional Notebook can't yet touch. It's a design choice. The guts of a Surface is in the screen (the tablet). In a typical laptop/notebook, the guts are shared in the same place as the keyboard which always makes it slightly thicker.
Before I got the Surface, I was thinking that the Surface Pro would be a better solution. Now, I'm not so sure. In fact, I suspect the Surface RT is a better solution for the role I've put it in - light computing. It's not like I'd be doing development work on one of my Ultrabooks.
Again, the biggest flaw in Surface RT remains the software. It's unrefined and SkyDrive remains woefully under integrated. However, these are things that are likely to be addressed. They've already released an update that made it significantly peppier overall.
After having such a negative first reaction to the Surface (the OS really doesn't give a good first impression) I've concluded that this is a pretty amazing device. It's gotten to the point where I don't know if I'll be getting another MacBook Air (the MacBook Pro remains my primary laptop device, taking over the role my ThinkPads had held since the early 90s).
