I saw that commercial from Microsoft comparing the Surface Pro to a MacBook Pro again last night. The usual, hey look, I am a tablet that is also a computer commercial.
Reminded me of one time in college where a kid had one of those Surface computers (one of the very early ones). He had it on it's little kickstand on his desk. He proceeded to use the touch screen with his finger, it fell over and right off the desk. I thought to myself, why in the hell would you want a touch screen on a computer?
That's the image I see every time that Microsoft Surface commercial plays. I laugh out loud just as I did when it happened to that poor kid in college.
Remember, the new Mars Rover is using an old PowerPC chip in 2021 and doing just fine... not everything needs to be a suped-up race car to get the job done. You build a device for what it is meant to be. Tablets with keyboards attached to them trying to be a computer is a tablet that doesn't know what it is. You're either touch screen or your not. The moment you try to be both is the moment you fall over off the desk and get laughed at.
I can certainly understand a strong preference for one form factor or another but just because one can't personally relate to a particular form factor doesn't mean it doesn't have merit or should be laughed at. The fact of the matter is whichever camp any of us are in there clearly is a market for pure tablets, 2-in-1's, and clamshell laptops.
With Apple returning to their own silicon and the ability to run iOS apps on them in MacOS I would hope that sometime in the future Apple will explore the 2-in-1 market. Despite the fact that I'm not a fan of the Surface Pro lineup, I'd be interested in a MacOS device that. In the case of an Apple 2-in-1 where I think Apple can beat Microsoft is in the fact that they can leverage a huge library of applications that are designed for touch, despite the fact that the base operating system was not. That's really where I don't care for the Surface Pro lineup - there's a touch screen but I'm not necessarily going to use it a lot.
How Apple goes about it should they choose to do so I dont know. Personally I'm not interested in any wholesale change in UI of MacOS to support this although I do recognize that adjustment is inevitable.
I guess for me, I wouldn't want to see a merging, I'd like to see a bridging device. We're all different though.