The only reason to announce hardware more than 6 months prior to availability is to deter people from buying iPads and Macbook Airs in the meanwhile. I've play

The only reason to announce hardware more than 6 months prior to availability is to deter people from buying iPads and Macbook Airs in the meanwhile. I've played with Win8 running on an Atom tablet and while the hardware sucked, the idea of being able to do real work on legacy apps (Photoshop, 3DS Max, video editing etc) on it is nice. The x86 Surface is definitely a laptop replacement. Not convinced about Metro yet though - depends on the apps we'll see on it I guess. I also have an iPad with the Logitech Ultra Thin BT keyboard cover and I really like it. If only iOS had CMD/TAB keyboard shortcut for swapping between apps and more open file system I could do a fair bit of web dev work on it. My 13" Macbook Pro feels like a brick compared to the iPad+keyboard cover. Still can't do Photoshop/3D/etc work on the iPad though.