So, it sounds like the 64 GB MacBook Air is a much better deal by both being a better thought out machine and having more usable storage space.
Ding, Ding, Ding. Give the man a prize. Yes it is, and that is a problem for Microsoft.
The circle is complete, and we can offer Marco an alternative blog post which goes ...
"I was amazed to discover how little space was available to the user of the Surface Pro 64GB model. Here, here, and here there are discussions of all the things that are pre-allocated from the SSD. Now it is running a full copy of Windows 8, so all of the OS features are available, but lets compare it to the Macbook Air, a machine with a similar price point and similar computational capability. It leaves Y% of the SSD available and its running Apple's laptop OS MacOS 10. Etc, etc."
Perhaps that one will come later. Helps educate the consumer and provides some feedback to Microsoft.
Of course it runs office. And with VMWare or VirtualBox or Parallels...every badly written legacy app is alive and well.
You don't in fact get as much capability even if you buy both a MacBook Air and an iPad for much more money. Especially after you've paid for Parallels and a copy of Windows 7 as well ;-)
As for the people who haven't quite figured out that you can keep a lot of your files in the cloud (and create them using Microsoft Office in the cloud), the cheap solution to the "storage problem" is as simple as a microSD card and a bit of copying.
Yes,it would be much nicer to have a 512GB Flash drive built in, but very few people would be willing to pay the price.
Here is the typical HP blurb about hard drive space (and as far as Surface Pro is concerned that SSD is a "hard drive")
"Actual formatted capacity is less. A portion of the hard drive is reserved for system recovery software — for notebooks up to: 30GB (Windows 8 & Windows 7), 12GB (MCE); for desktops up to: 30GB (Windows 8), 14GB (Windows 7), 12GB (MCE). For hard drives 1GB=1 billion bytes. " [1]
When is the last time you bought a windows Laptop with less than a 80GB hard drive in it? What was your user experience with that?
Somehow, people seem to thing that the Surface Pro is something other than Win8 but it isn't. It's a laptop with an optional keyboard and a touch screen. It is Microsoft's "take" on the Tablet experience. It is a mashup of legacy code and modern product design. It's an unattractive date with an interest in entomology.
It's a Macbook Air competitor, not an iPad competitor, the Air btw contains this warning for the 64GB model [2] : "1. 1GB=1 billion bytes; actual formatted capacity less." How much less? They don't even say. But it would be fun to find out.
The 'bug' here is that Hard Drives got super big super quick and nobody back in product management got the memo that SSDs were the new hawtness so trim the fat.
[1] http://www.shopping.hp.com/en_US/home-office/-/products/Lapt...
[2] http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/family/macboo...
EDIT: its -> it's