I can tell you that even my Nexus 7 is rather abysmal at handling Google Docs documents. The Bluetooth keyboard connection is flaky at best, gets much worse when Wi-Fi is turned on (which makes working on a cloud document rather inconvenient), the typing often lags far behind the keyboard, it's hard to do anything beyond the basics (e.g. I actually need footnotes to cite things in the work I'm doing), etc. etc.

I haven't used a Surface but from Mike K.'s description it certainly seems like it could better handle some of those tasks. Maybe Lollipop will help, but I won't be able to tell until the OTA loads.

That might be true in the future, but speaking from the present, this is how it is.

For perspective, I have written Android apps using AIDE on a Nexus 7 and Nexus 5. I also manipulate docs and spreadsheets using google's systems (which are adequate for making quick edits, but not something i would sit down and write with for an extended amount of time).

I think that the AIDE IDE is a great piece of work! Admittedly, I have only created fairly trivial apps using the template projects, but it is amazing to be able to compile Java code and create a bundled Android application on my Android phone.

It seems to bother my son a great deal that I have always used Android phones and never an iPhone. It is the availability of things like AIDE that make an Android phone also functional as a "real computer."

MS Office for iOS has been out for a while, those apps are excellent and fully touch enabled. you can download them for free, use the for reading and presenting files. edit mode is available through a office365 subscription.

mind you, MS Office for WinModern does not exist - no touch UI there. but it does for iOS. absolutely amazing.

iOS on iPad, especially after the redesign in iOS 7, has always felt like it was merely scaled up from iPhone. Because, for the most part, it was. I believe Apple could do a lot more with iPad UI to make it more suitable for larger screen sizes and content creation. Rumors about things like split screen multitasking make me hopeful, though.