Gotcha, the ipad is a better choice for you. Its a huge compromise for me, stylus, MS office, OneNote, I could list out dozens of compromises but that's what I need, but these in part are what make the sp3 a MUCH superior tablet for my needs.
Btw you can add Gmail accounts to the windows outlook app. Have you tried that zinio app for magazines? Awesome app and has most if not all magazines. Music apps I agree with you, but I play all my music on my phone, although there are some great music apps on windows.
I think my main point is that your uses are pretty specific and by far not necessarily universal, and can be adjusted to the windows platform.
As for app/program convergence ill put my money on MS. You still have the desktop which will NEVER go away, their is still a need to hunker down with a mouse that will not go away soon, yet when its time to go into tablet mode the sp3 is ready to go. I don't find touch optimized desktop programs hard to use and certainly don't see a lack of responsiveness, try desktop OneNote or PhotoShop for 2 good examples.
Also notifications are coming in windows 10 as well as Cortana.
I think for me, it's that the iPad opened up an entirely new kind of computing device for me. It can't replace my laptop, but it brings me all sorts of additional functionality over the laptop. I'm frustrated that Microsoft is largely ignoring this kind of use, because it's exactly what has sold hundreds of millions of tablets over the last few years. I don't think my uses are pretty specific at all - I think they are exactly what people buy tablets to do - and I see dozens of people in every airport I'm in using them for exactly that. I am starting to see more Surface Pros, but I have yet to see someone using them as anything but a laptop (other than myself). Unfortunately, the app store appears not to have improved much at all in the two years since I bought my first Surface Pro and came to these exact same conclusions.
Still, I think we will be keeping the SP3 because I now have a specific work use that it seems to excel in (I'm testing it this week and so far so good). It can travel with me instead of my laptop because it is a full computer. It's lighter. I don't have to remove it from my bag at security. The 3:2 screen is a HUGE HUGE improvement over the old models. The keyboard and touchpad are also hugely improved and I can get real work done with them. When I'm on location, I can use just the tablet with the stylus, and record data without having to always awkwardly hold my laptop or look for a surface (ha) to set it on. I can enter all the data with the stylus while wearing gloves, even if it's raining out! This works great for me.
Still, at the end of the day, I'm not going to leave my iPad at home because when I want to do all that other stuff when I'm traveling, at the hotel, or even working and doing other stuff in the background, the 'tablet' side of things just isn't good enough.
A few things I'm still disappointed about.
The cameras are truly awful. They are on par with my iPhone 3g. Not even the 3gs which brought autofocus. I take a lot of notes in the field, and I should be able to insert them directly from one device, not take them with my phone and have to transfer them to the tablet later.
The auto-dim function barely works. It's all over the place.
The sound from the headphone jack is sub-par (yes, I'm a huge snob here, but I use this a lot and both my iPhone and iPad are far superior).
The capacitive home button is far too easy to trigger, but too essential for me to want to disable. I like that they moved it from the previous generations, but now my arm triggers it when I'm writing in portrait.
The lack of fingerprint access is a huge pain. Our domain policy requires passwords too complex to easily type on-screen and the picture password function is too unreliable unless I make it extremely simple.
The touchpad is hugely improved but should be better still. Keep making it bigger!
The power brick could be smaller still. Take a cue from apple and make the second extension cord optional and offer an integrated prong plug into the main brick. It saves a lot of space.
The battery life is good for a Windows laptop (especially one this thin and light) but less than half of what I get from my iPad.
I'm actually quite fond of the touch to mouse conversion teamviewer does (like sliding your finger moves the mouse cursor like a trackpad) and I'm curious if sp3 has the same option. Makes x86 applications pretty easy to use on touch IMO, of course a native touch style iPad app is better for tablets tough.. But like said earlier, having the ability to go full desktop is great
