If they priced it at $199, I have no doubt in my mind that it would have taken over iPad sales in its first quarter alone. That said, they would be taking HUGE losses per device. Woud they take back enough of the market to make that worth it? And if so, then what? When do they raise prices? At some point they would have to.
I do feel like the keyboard is a bit pricey, but the device isn't anywhere close to NEEDING the keyboard to be useful. In fact, unless you plan to use it as a laptop replacement, you don't need a keyboard at all, since you are likely to be doing very little typing. The kicked is, you get the choice to use the keyboard, and it's very good. For many users this is a truly viable laptop replacement when paired with a keyboard.
Expandable memory is also a plus, and something a lot of people don't think about. Tablets, and nowadays even phones, are coming in a sort of one size fits most flavor. Decide how much onboard memory you want, and that's that. Well, with this thing you can drop a 64GB sd card in there and double or triple (depending on which model you get) your current memory capacity. As cheap as SD cards are now, thats pretty sweet. And if you are into storing media, you can also have multiple SD cards to swap on the fly. This could be nice for some car trips, storing an extensive music collection, or really anything else you can think of. The 64GB Surface plus another 64GB sick gets you 128GB of storage (yes, I did the arithmetic for you!). That's about the size of SSD most ultrlight laptops are coming with, so you really shouldn't be left wanting much. I use a macbook air with 128GB SSD as my main work computer and don't find myself looking for more space. Granted, I am not the type of user that installs everything under the sun and never looks back. YMMV.
Talking to some of the sales reps at the Microsoft store in the mall, they were saying that businesses were snapping these things up. I didn't ask them to define what "snapping up" meant, but I know they were sold out for a while there before the holidays. Still, sold out can mean a lot of things, especially when you don't know what kind of stock they had to begin with. I can see it being desirable though, especially for businesses that want tablets that are going to integrate well with their desktop machines. Any custom software they install needs to be coded once, compiled twice, and they essentially have the same software on both platforms. This is much easier than it ever has been before (and will be even easier still with the surface pro).
I am, however disappointed in desktop view. Windows purists might think I am crazy, but on an RT device it is useless, unless they plan to give us the ability to install apps outside of the MS store. As it stands, it quite literally exists because MS seems like they were too lazy to properly code Office 2013 to open fully in the metro UI.
The screen resolution also leaves something to be desired. Overall, that is the most disappointing aspect of this device, for me. 1024x768... really? That wasn't even cool ten years ago. The equally priced competition blows that out of the water, as do a few less expensive options. I am honestly not sure what they were thinking here.
Having used a WP8 device, I also notice W8RT to be a bit sluggish on the Surface at times. Usually this happened when I loaded games (on the demo unit, we don't have one... yet) and decided not to close them. So I guess one could argue that this might happen on any standard PC too, although none of the games were particularly graphically intensive (we are talking fruit ninja, cut the rope, some jetpack game that was actually quite fun). I would say it is about 85% where it needs to be to compete directly with the iPad in those regards.
Not sure what MS logic was with the bundled keyboards. If you want anything but the 32GB version, you are forced into paying an extra $100 for the bundled keyboard. So, if you want any of the neat custom colors, you are stuck with at least two keyboards. Why not just allow the user to buy any color keyboard they want and attach it to their purchase for $100 (and keep any subsequent purchases ate $120 if they choose)? This decision truly baffles me. My wife literally didn't buy one of these because she wanted the 64GB with a pink keyboard (so she is likely getting it for xmas), but we will sit around with a black keyboard collecting dust. I suppose I can either wait and see what the pro is like and just buy one without (since I was looking at black anyway) or try and sell it for $80 or so, but still, why am I forced into buying two keyboards. It just doesn't make sense!
