Idk how recent you tried this but I had the entirely opposite experience with an old Asus transformer mini (which has similar detachable keyboard shenanigans as

Idk how recent you tried this but I had the entirely opposite experience with an old Asus transformer mini (which has similar detachable keyboard shenanigans as the surface). Ubuntu had some issues rotating the screen but Fedora worked out of the box. The only complaint was that sometimes you had to coax it to bring up the on-screen keyboard, but everything else, from screen rotation to the gnome finger swiping gestures worked really well in both laptop and tablet mode. Maybe its microsoft using a particularly strange hardware stack or just luck.