Good luck getting the touch screen to work flawlessly with your Linux install

Yup, I'm running Ubuntu in a Lenovo Yoga - for the most part it's great, but the touchscreen stuff and tablet mode do not work at all.

As a developer who spends the entire time in the terminal and only touches the keyboard... so?

Unless you are reading this in lynx then you do sometimes use graphical terminals. For some people reading websites and consuming other media that don't require much textual input is more comfortable in 'tablet mode'. Dual use nature of Surface computers allows people to carry around one device instead of two and with no syncing required.

Not sure about this particular machine, but touchscreen laptops work just fine with Linux nowadays from what I can gather.