I've had multiple Surface products starting at the first Pro model. They are very versatile and "the ultimate Windows experience" but that experience doesn't speak to much in terms of quality.

The operating system aside (Windows indexer breaking, several driver problems, basic functionality missing and no ability to use the Feedback Hub without turning on full telemetry, etc), the hardware is/was riffled with problems. The Broadcom multi-communications chip (WiFi/Bluetooth) is a mess. It's been revision after revision, firmware patched a million times, etc. It STILL has problems connecting to networks, staying connected, "daydreaming," almost unusable with IPv6 until really recently, etc.

The power/dock connector is REALLY finicky on the newer models (bumping it disconnects the dock and bounces all the devices), the original Pro 1/2 connector is garbage, the display port pass through is more of a "when it works" and "when it works properly." IE, 4K is almost impossible to get working and requires a dance of turning off devices, unplugging/replugging, rebooting, etc. The DPI scaling stuff is a nightmare (yeah it's the OS but it's part of this experience).

Ontop of all this, the hardware is glued together and nearly impossible to work on, not without breaking it. Even knowing this "going in," it's frustrating when it's out of warranty and now they want half the price of a base model device to look at it. Oh, the hardware is extremely fragile. Dropping from 1 ft will shatter the screen. I've had this happen multiple times to me and several colleagues. If you baby the device, you might be fine, except I know someone who's device shattered in between the office, sitting on a car seat and taking it out at home. I don't know that you can "win" here.

The warranty is possibly the worst aspect of this device. Without the extended warranty, you will never get any service for anything on the device. They will claim it's impossible to have any defects, manufacturing problems, etc. With the warranty, they will fight you tooth and nail to replace it, asking you to re-install Windows even when the display is shattered as if that would make it any better. After they agree to replace it, they'll randomly lose your order (as in they don't even have a tracked incident for you), they'll lose your return even though the tracking information shows it received and signed for, the exchange will go great and you have your replacement and months later they charge you the full replacement cost (even though the incident has been closed for a month or so).

Oh, and one last thing, I had a device out of warranty by 1 day. Yes, I know it was out of warranty by a day, but the manager in store (Portland) refused to not only look up the device's extended warranty (they couldn't find it in their system and I had to look it up for them), they completely refused to work with me in any way. They basically treated me like I hadn't bought the device from them at all and forced me to either have to pay full price for a replacement (that they said they couldn't do there in store) or buy another device. Great customer service and support all around.

I fully believe their low return rates... knowing how they get them that low, that's something everyone should be aware of before going into a Surface device. You'll get a hard sell on accepting your broken device, even while in the warranty period.

I worked as a desktop support consultant for several years supporting organizations like the ones you're describing: 20, 50, 100 staff and no dedicated IT. These places were a nightmare of "we had a problem and worked around it" solutions that took caused hours long appointments for just simple "the printer doesn't show up on one computer".

A lot of these places I had remote contracts with that I would go in and do maintenance on their "servers" (somebody's machine under the desk, usually the office secretary or boss) that staved off a lot of problems, but the point still stands: these places were in no way stable on their own.

ReactOS is an interesting project and that's about it so far. It has a lot of unimplemented APIs, or "just enough" APIs. This doesn't sound too bad when you realize it can run low level drivers for networking, basic video and Firefox, but it becomes much more apparent how incomplete, and unfortunately unstable, this OS really is:
- The UI can hard lock randomly
- A lot of the Win32 layer is based on Wine, which means it's a port, and has a lot of issues running programs, even Firefox
- Video acceleration is completely absent, let alone 3d, 2d acceleration isn't there
- Due to no acceleration, scrolling in Firefox brings back the days of slow modems as you watch chunks of the screen fill in, even after the page has loaded
- VERY RUDIMENTARY NT kernel APIs... IE you need an external wireless manager to use WiFi, if you can get a WiFi driver running at all
- Most drivers won't work, even if you force them in... only basic ones, like some of the virtio ones, even work
- The networking is very basic and lacks any advanced functionality, firewall included
- No IPv6 support... you don't care until you do
- Bare bones NTFS support (readonly) and FAT support is really just "read and write files"
- File explorer is very buggy and simple, crashing with even the most basic of operations, ie moving files
- No UNC paths and poor integration of Samba means no file sharing or a long road to maybe getting smbclient to work

Aside from all those issues, really it's the random hanging of software, the UI, lack of acceleration and minimal implementation of APIs that makes this not really usable beyond curiosity. It'd be REALLY hard to use this in any daily situation without A LOT of frustration. Running it in a VM means it boots quick, but after the 30th reboot "just playing around," it's a no go for me.

It's already possible to boot up a Linux distro, regardless of the state of the touch screen... the UEFI on the Surface x86 devices (not ARM hardware) can have secure boot disabled. The TPM is engaged by the bootloader and OS, it doesn't lock you out from making changes to the disk if you disable secure boot and write your own filesystem.

Secure Boot and the TPM (on the x86 Surface devices) are less about locking you out from running thirdparty software and more about preventing malware and other undesirable software from running on the device. Sure it can be used to lock you out on devices that don't allow you to disable secure boot, but that's just not this device.

On the last few pages of the thread at XDA, there are links and screenshots of: PuTTY, Tightvnc, 7zip and BOCHS (just to name a few):
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1885399&page=23

Windows RT contains a complete Win32 API environment (all the standard DLLs are there: kernel32.dll, user32.dll, etc).

Visual Studio 2012 comes with the ARM compiler, so building executables is fairly easy. The restriction, to not allow ARM Win32 applications, only came late in the development cycle, so it's really only hacked in. Visual Studio will even allow native development for ARM applications, going as far to remote debugging the application, by simply adding a "enabled" setting to the ARM manifest file.

The Windows RT SDK for building executables is not required to link existing applications, only a library file is required and that is easily built (in the XDA thread, a tool was posted that builds library files from live DLLs).

I don't know about you but I wasn't born with MDP or some other degenerative disease. I'm not equal to those people and they're not equal to me.

If you're saying that we all have the same opportunity, then you're wrong too. Bill Gates' children started out with more opportunity and will go on to continue to have more opportunity than I. They'll never worry about paying rent or having to maintain their car for example, let alone what type of company they'll run and whether or not they'll do so indirectly or directly.

The constitution sure has some nice ideas and declarations in it, but it's certainly not how it really is... and not how it was back then.