Unless you are a member of the Surface team at Microsoft, perhaps, you CANNOT do the things you listed with the Surface, because it has NOT been released yet and I don't know that any independent resource can tell us they took OneNote notes on it or run Matlab on a monitor or any of the things you described -- YET. Giving students toys alone won't work. Just like giving Tablet PCs to people in the 2000's didn't work. That's because what you need is a usable machine and a thriving ecosystem of software development. When that happens you don't need to master-plan taking over the education field, any more than you need to master-plan taking over the enterprise. The iPad is slowly getting into the enterprise without any apparent evil master plan -- becuase the executives bring it from home and demand useful touch business software. The same will happen in education given a good device and a good platform.

I get Netflix via AppleTV, TiVo, and a sony BD player on one TV in the house (I'm not counting my other viewing options or mobile.) I love captions, they make it much easier for me to understand and follow. When I watch Netflix via AppleTV, I get beautiful captions. Same content via TiVo, nada. First step, they should make sure if the CC is already there, that everybody passes it through without trouble. There must be so many people who don't know the captions are really available on the content I'm enjoying now... before I started using the AppleTV path, I had no idea the captions were there

This will be very welcome on my bike where I must use an expensive GPS just because an iPhone won't work through the gloves. The iPhone is an excellent motorcycle touring companion -- it runs GPS, streams and plays music (not to mention the phone and internet functionality on stops.) But it is severely limited because it won't play well with gloves.