Bad news guys, I returned it.
I'm just not quite in the niche that the surface was designed for. I have a laptop workstation that I use to crunch big data. I bought the surface because, after moving into a more managerial role, I thought I could use something lighter and fulfill my tablet desires.
First the good. I love the metro interface. In my mind, no other OS comes close, especially the live tile menu and the multitasking. I found the gestures to be completely intuitive and extremely useful. I also loved the hardware. The fully adjustable kickstand was fantastic and I loved opening it all the way and typing on the on-screen keyboard. I never broke out the type cover unless I was doing Real Work.
The bad:
- The office products weren't in the metro interface. I'm not sure why this bothered me so much, but the office products on my wife's iPad are amazing, and significantly better than their desktop counterparts for a tablet.
- As a corollary to the above, the fact that metro OneNote != OneNote 2013 is very annoying. Sharepoint is already somewhat finicky, and relying on a cloud service to sync the two application on the same device bordered on stupid, especially when I got on the plane and tried to consolidate some handwritten notes.
- The surface was slightly unreliable. The wifi driver decided to disappear, making me lose all wifi ability. A restore brought it back, but nothing ever worked the same... office kept asking for credentials, OneDrive Business stopped syncing reliably, and the live tile for my pictures app stopped working (which flipped through pictures of my newborn, a major reason I liked the tiles!). Microsoft actually gave me a new unit because I was about to hop on a plane and wanted a reliable device, but the new unit stopped displaying the on-screen keyboard after attaching the type cover and the detaching it, rendering the tablet close to useless until a restart.
- It chugged on my data models. I was hoping it wouldn't be that bad, but it was. My fault really for building it on 3 years of invoice data.
- The app ecosystem, or lack thereof, got to me. I always kind of scoffed at people that whined that they couldn't get the social app du-jour on windows, but it was annoying to have no LinkedIn app, Spotify, and others. Plex for Windows 8.1 is better than any other device, however.
As I said earlier, ultimately, I'm not the customer Microsoft was catering to. I kept on wanting to stay out of the desktop mode, but the ability to do both is literally the point of the surface. I ended up doing all my real work on my workstation, and then got grumpy when the surface didn't behave like the tablet I actually wanted.
My heart wants to have a single device for content creation and content consumption. Empirically, however, I use two devices even when given the option. Apple has stated explicitly that that is their model, laptops for a full OS experience, and a tablet for a tablet experience. I don't like the idea but it works. I don't think I'll get another apple laptop as long as there is a surface, however. I'm typing this on my macbook air and wish I was back on the surface.
At the end of the day I think I'm going to keep using my workstation (out of necessity) and replace the macbook air with an iPad. That said, the firesale Surface 2's are tempting...