I own one and that is definitely my experience.

Most tablets are content consumption devices only. The SP3 allowed you to be a "little" productive on the go with a type keyboard, and a "lot" productive in the office with a dock and a real keyboard.

If you want to be fully productive on the go, then I'd agree that buying a full laptop (e.g. Thinkpad, MBP) makes a lot of sense, and even then I'd still plug in a real mouse.

The Surface's niche is that it can be a content consumption device, semi-productive device, and a fully productive device when you need it to be (with no cover, type cover, and full keyboard/mouse respectively).

I will say the SP3's four biggest issues in my view:

- Touchpad on the cover is just terrible. Totally unusable.

- The Surface itself is too slippery without the cover.

- Some overheating issues when the GPU is utilised.

- The magnetic power cord fails too often/easily. Replaced it twice already. Look on Amazon for reviews/pictures to see what I mean.

Wow. I've used a SP3 hard for about a year now. I charge nightly, throw it in my bag daily, and cart it from meeting to meeting all day long. It's been great. I find the touchpad is excellent, I've not had problems with overheating (I mostly use Chrome and Office applications), and I'm happy with the power cord. My only critique is that the keyboard is a little louder than I'd like, and for that reason I'm considering buying the SP4 keyboard.

Coming from a rMBP 15", I found the SP3 touchpad was too small for me to use comfortably. But it was still usable.

Now that they have increased the size of the touchpad and made the keyboard better, I actually have a bit of a dilemma. You can customize the SP4 preorder with an i7 and 16GB of memory for cheaper than the Surface Book i7 with 8GB memory. I'm not sure how necessary the Nvidia card is for my purposes.

I loathe touchpads... I only mouse so I've never had any issue with the SP3s KB

Now that I've used the SP4 for a good 30 minutes, I've changed my opinion. The new SP4 type cover is vastly improved over the old one. I could use it as my primary input device.

In fact, I think it's actually a problem for MS! :) The reason why the Surface Book was so appealing was partly because the keyboard/trackpad just wasn't that great with the SP3. Now that they've improved the type cover so much, the SB seems less necessary.

Good observation and consistent with a person close to me who got an SP3 for use in a college environment as an instructor. Their experience is that the keyboard is fine for typical use, but the trackpad is awful compared to what they experienced after years of MBP use (remedied by an external mouse). They have small hands and very precise fingers though, so I can see how they are potentially an exception.