Sure looks like an iPad competitor to me. Also a MacAir competitor, and an UltraBook competitor. These devices are starting to converge.
Interesting, the MSFT video for Surface focuses entirely on the keyboard - they don't even show the screen turned on or anything but the keyboard. The gallery shots similarly emphasize the K/B.
Surface by Microsoft I guess they are going for the consumers who don't like on-screen keyboards. Which is smart.
I wish they'd also grow a pair and go after handwriting recognition too. Apple is constrained here, the ghost of Newton meant that they would never use HWR so long as Jobs was alive. But a quarter of the world naturally uses HWR - the Asian countries - and with current processing power, HWR works really well, even on a first-gen iPad.
Apple is going after voice control with Siri, but I'm not sure if Apple or MSFT are pushing voice input i.e. dictation. That works really well too. I dictate most of my texts now.
Finally, I've played with one of the new Nokia smartphones running mobile Windows, I guess we call it
Windows RT now. I was pretty impressed - they seem to have figured out how to make a Windows that doesn't think you have a mouse or stylus and a 13" screen. That was the problem with previous tablet Windows, you were always tapping on tiny menu bars and squinting at objects scaled down from a 17" monitor, they just didn't get it. I'm suspecting, based on 5 minutes of playing, that they've got it now.
It is critical for MSFT to get Windows RT and Windows 8 right, because the power of their Windows-Office-Intel system is eroding.
Office is increasingly looking like a dinosaur, kids today use
Google Docs,
OpenOffice works every bit as well as Office and is free, Apple is building its productivity suite. I bought my last copy of Office in 2004. Intel is chasing other operating systems just as MSFT is chasing other processors. In 2012, the argument that you should get a Windows tablet to run Office is wearing pretty thin. In 2016, the young folks won't care about it at all.