I don't know. I imagine it's like this: you want a tablet for lounging on your couch and watching movies or browsing the internet; you want a light laptop for d

I don't know. I imagine it's like this: you want a tablet for lounging on your couch and watching movies or browsing the internet; you want a light laptop for doing actual work at Starbucks or your local library. You could get an iPad and an MBA, or you could just get a Surface and have both in one. So it's not really some new capability--rather, it's a single device that can do the job of two. Not only is this more cheaper but it is also more convenient: you don't have to sync your files between devices or keep track of two different computers (with different operating systems, at that!); you can just use your single Windows computer for both tasks. I think the slightly odd design of Windows 8 is actually very conducive to this: for lounging around, you have Metro and for actual work you have the classic desktop. I could certainly see people currently on Windows liking that. Now, I don't know if the Surface actually fulfills that role in practice, but that's what I imagine the idea to be. I also suspect that this isn't aimed at Apple customers at all--the person getting the iPad and MBA would still get them out of brand loyalty. Rather, this is aimed at your stalwart Windows user who is considering getting an iPad but isn't crazy about Apple and wouldn't want to switch to OS X. On a completely unrelated note, I would love to get one and run Linux. Unfortunately, it seems there is going to be a lot of useless nonsense around secure boot that would make this difficult (at least for the ARM version). But I think this is the perfect device to play around with the new KDE touch interface.