Hello from Chicagoland! Picked up a 32GB surface with touch cover from Best Buy. Really loving the thing. Came from the Apple side of things, still own an iPad, but my phone is a WP8 Lumia 920 now also, Microsoft is finally coming around.
Welcome to the forum. MS has chosen a bold new direction indeed. It is shocking now but in a few years people will wonder what all the fuss was about and it will seem only natural that MS took the course it did given the direction of computing (more portable and touch enabled).