It's a 14" Retina-like notebook, great trackpad with click buttons, extremely powerful internals, all-metal chassis, and only slightly bigger than a Macbook. They sell them at the MS store and if you buy from there they come with plain-vanilla Windows installed, without crapware. They also run Ubuntu extremely well.

There are downsides: it's very expensive, you're buying from a less-well-known supplier, parts are proprietary so home repair is out of the question, and you have to be OK with the black chassis and 90's-hacker-green keyboard.

But the system itself is outstanding. Don't know why it's not recommended more often, especially considering it's very Linux-friendly.