Programming on touch enabled or tablet sized devices is going to be difficult. If you want to leverage open source software to learn things like web programming and server side stuff then you will want to run those things typically under a Unix variant, Linux being the most used. You can do this on Windows with virtual machines and software like Vagrant.

If you are getting the device to take notes, do research, email, twitter, facebook, whatever-cool-kids-use, etc. for high school work then sure it will probably do the trick. Most anything these days would work for that so it would be hard to justify the cost.