i think that’s the point most people are missing. while i personally would have liked to see it priced a bit lower (starting at $400 - $450 would have felt abou

i think that’s the point most people are missing. while i personally would have liked to see it priced a bit lower (starting at $400 - $450 would have felt about right to me), i can totally see why they didn’t and i think those arguing for a lower price are being too short-sighted. this isn’t just the launch of a single device, it’s also effectively a launch of a new platform, and the success of the latter is far more important.. as they said from day one (and as i'm sure they were repeatedly emphasizing to their hardware partners over the past few months), they aren’t going to undercut OEMs on price. which makes total sense. they’re not Apple; it’s going to take more than one device to grow the platform and they’re playing to where they always play in the market: offering Windows on as wide a variety of devices and form-factors as possible (now also including some built in-house). undercutting other offerings may have boosted Surface sales in the near-term, but overtime it would have probably crippled broader adoption of Windows RT by alienating the OEMs that are critical in pushing it. the general argument for a cheap(er) Surface RT is that it’s needed to help grow the Windows Store. while i think it would help to some extent, most of that comes in just the fact that it’s out there, as a flagship device, representing the platform in the market. i think their approach of relying on the large (soon-to-be) Windows 8 install base to incentivize developers is a far sounder strategy for building it out.. even at a lower price point, a few million additional Surface RT units (maybe) aren’t going to have as large of an impact on demand for Windows Store Apps as the hundreds of millions of devices that will eventually be running Windows 8; what it would have done though is likely alienate the OEMs that would otherwise be pushing those sales, and eventually Windows RT sales down the road.