2.) There are two Surface models, one is the Surface RT (which this article is talking about) and the other is the yet to be released Surface Pro.
The Surface RT is slightly heaving than the latest generate iPad.
The Surface Pro is supposed to be 2 lbs., which is lighter than the smallest Macbook Air and with the exception of form factor, it is every bit a real computer as is the Macbook Air.
3.) There is no start button in Windows 8 or Windows RT, so I don't know what device you were demo'ing.
> 2.) The Surface RT is slightly heaving than the latest generate iPad... The Surface Pro is supposed to be 2 lbs.,
I had the Surface RT (with touch keyboard) in one hand and my MacBook Air in the other hand. The MacBook Air felt lighter. I did the same thing with a Surface Pro I wasn't supposed to see on a different occasion; the MacBook Air still felt lighter. It could be the Surface Pro I saw was a hardware prototype.
Weight doesn't seem like the Surface's major advantage.
> 3) There is no start button in Windows 8 or Windows RT
You're right that there isn't a start menu in desktop mode (unless someone installs the popular apps that put it back). However, there is a hardware start button on the surface RT I saw... and I did hit it quite often when holding it in landscape. Somehow my hand just wanted to hold the device in the middle from below (perhaps because it's easier to balance? Torsion is heavy?) and got tired much quicker when holding on one side.
The desktop looks like this: http://oyster.ignimgs.com/wordpress/stg.ign.com/2012/11/Surf...
Microsoft's personal computing empire is built not directly on Windows and Office, but on the million little customizations and plugins that people build on top of them. That's where their lock-in comes from these days.
If they can't put that platform on the new hot computing hardware, their advantage is gone. New people buying a hypothetical "touch first" MS tablet would not only be free to choose other applications than Office, but their enterprises would be forced to rewrite their MS-locked solutions. Thus making it easier and easier for IT groups to push alternate desktop and server platforms.
If Outlook is reduced to just-another-mail client, and the workflow/management 'applications' built on top of it have to be serviced elsewhere, you might as well let employees choose mac or linux machines. And you may not even be able to justify Exchange itself after a few years of that.
[0] http://www.microsoft.com/Surface/en-US/surface-with-windows-... [1] http://www.apple.com/macbookair/specs.html
EDIT: Those are without the keyboard. Depending on the keyboard, I can see how Surface might have been slightly heavier.
1) The UI is incredibly confusing. It, again, feels like it's just a windows machine with some goofy /thing/ bolted to the top of it. It reminds me of windows media center.
2) At least the one we got was really heavy. Heavier than a macbook air, which is a "real" computer.
3) We all-too-frequently seemed to get dumped back into a standard windows desktop with a startbutton and everything...which would be great, if it functioned that way. All I wanted to do was create a PPTP connection on the thing, but absolutely couldn't figure out how to make that happen.
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I am fairly far from an apple fan, but the reason that the iPad has been so successful is that apple designed it from the beginning to be a new device with new UI paradigms.
Android did the same.
Microsoft, at least from the experience I got with surface, absolutely did not, which is sad, because they're easily poised to be able to dominate tablets.
The "holy shit" dream scenario that I have, and I think it's shared by a lot of tablet users, is a tablet as a detachable auxiliary monitor that I can dock applications into.
If I drag, for example, a browser window over to my surface monitor, that surface monitor should be able to get picked up and go with me, and then I should be able to dock that back into my desktop and go back to working there.