The idea that any platform besides pen, paper, and a hiding place provides any privacy for your documents these days is a delusion.

I got sucked into the Apple ecosystem and I fled as fast as I could. I got an HTC Flyer as a first go and it sucks. I then fled to Windows Phone and haven't looked back. Next tablet will be a Surface, no question.

So it does all those things you claim users don't want. How does that prevent Surface from doing all the things users do want?

Let's see... streaming video from Hulu, Netflix, Amazon? Yep. Lots of games? Yep. Take photos and mess around with them? Yep. Take notes? Yep. A UI that is fun to use? Yep. Skydrive / cloud storage? Yep. Nice looking device? Yep.

What exactly are these missing features that everyone wants that they can get from Android and iPad tablets??

I really like the Surface Pro, but it's a little out of my price range. I picked up a Lenovo touchscreen laptop with 13" screen for $450 and it's fantastic. The touchscreen interface is extremely intuitive and fun to use. Though I find myself reaching to scroll windows and click buttons on my other laptops and desktop monitors now, argh. I think Surface will be a hit, especially if all the MS haters will just STFU and judge the product independent of the source. Me, I hate Apple, and I want iTunes to die a horrible death. That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with Apple or iTunes, it's just a matter of taste. That said, I won't be missing Balmer. And Gnome, don't even think about doing away with middle click paste, that's got to be the best Linux UI feature ever.

How do these compare to incandescent lights for color/temperature appearance and so forth. That's been the real deal breaker for me so far with other incandescent alternatives.

I am really glad that you have absolutely zero political power.

Where do you get your numbers? Without references that can be checked your supposed budget numbers mean nothing.

Buy guns, they are durable goods that won't loose value if they are maintained or properly stored. Then you can either sell them to all the evil rich people left in their gated compounds or use the guns to lay siege to the rich bastards and just take all their stuff :-)

The new "start menu" just adds more work for me and adds very little value to the experience. This isn't a bad format for a tablet, but when you're on a laptop and not in the Modern UI - forcing the use of that new start menu is just absurd.

I disagree. I found the new start menu to be very helpful, much better than the old start button. Hitting the windows key is really not that challenging, the start menu uses the whole screen, search by typing is cool, and the uncluttered desktop is great. Far as I can tell, it's just windows 7 with a cool UI. Yeah, it's new, so lazy users with an axe to grind against MS and Windows will hate it, DUH. The whole two hour learning curve has really got these old dogs stressed out. They won't even give it a chance, so why bother reading their reviews.

(Look at the office ribbon - despite some of its nice features there are quite a few places where it just managed to add more work for the user to accomplish a task

I disagree entirely. I much prefer the ribbon to the old pull-down interface. Heck, even Matlab switched to a ribbon over the old drop down menus. Once again, it's that steep 30 minute learning curve throwing folks off, they just want to do it the old, lame way.