For taking notes, reading and replying to email, and creating documents and presentations, Visual Studio, any Ultrabook with a bigger screen or better keyboard is a better tool (say a Vaio 11 with similar thickness/weight). That leaves drawing diagrams as the only think the Surface Pro is a better tool for. I call that niche.
"any Ultrabook with a bigger screen or better keyboard is a better tool"
Actually, the device that gets you creating in the way most comfortable for one's self is the better tool. You also skipped over the "take notes, and draw diagrams" -- pen computing there.
He mentioned drawing diagrams. And, for 99% of people, the handwriting recognition is not good enough to beat the effectiveness of just typing or dictating.
That might be a great poll - what percentage of HN posts are done with a pen versus dictation (which I do a lot of mine with when I'm on a smart phone) versus keyboard (vast majority) versus pen.
Right now the Wacom tablet is the niche that justifies the high-price for the Pro. Bring it down another $200-$300 and it starts to make inroads into the mass market (where it most certainly is not a player right now)
Yer not getting it. The point is to take notes in a format useful the user, which frequently is not computer-friendly. I know at the office we frequently take smartphone photos of whiteboards. Same usecase.
Give me a bit of credit for knowing something about taking notes. Having notes immediately searchable and recallable is useful to the user. When I take notes in a meeting with evernote, they are available on my tablet, my smartphone, my laptop, and, when I head back to the office, on my desktop. They are collected in the appropriate notebook, and tagged. Searching for notes over the last few years based on their content is invaluable - and, my writing will never be good enough for handwriting recognition to do the job of understanding what I've written.
For those people with neat handwriting, that the recognition algorithms can pick up - I can understand how writing with a pen might be more cnovenient.
Your scenario is different to mine. I use meta data to find handwitten notes in OneNote. I tried EverNote and found it had bells and whistles but wasn't anywhere near as easy as OneNote for tap to open app, yap again for a new note, and write with a stylus.
Just to butt in regarding the handwriting recognition, I used OneNote extensively to take class notes during my Masters. It faired pretty well. The pen is godsend, just not for writing but other tasks too like software menu selection.
People underestimate the social construction of writing in meetings versus typing. I used a Newton MP2000 for several years as a replacement for paper notes (and calendar, etc.) and it was magnificent in that role -- pulling out a laptop, however tiny, and typing in meetings was and likely often still is socially unacceptable.
By contrast, an iPad won't replace a Newton in this context -- you can't write on it worth a damn, and typing on a glass keyboard is still typing.
I think Microsoft's vision for the Surface as a do-everything computer is admirable, but their execution has been fairly poor thus far, and I suspect it's because the hardware and software aren't there yet.
Does anyone doubt that Apple would release a Surface-like device if they thought it was good enough? I'm sure there are prototypes at Apple dating back years (in fact I saw a demo of a pen-based Duo back in the mid-90s -- between Jobs's first and second comings). Mac OS X already has handwriting recognition and all kinds of supporting infrastructure in it, the difference is that Apple doesn't release products it doesn't think it can sell; Microsoft is willing to experiment and kind of desperate.
Ultrabook you can't use as a tablet. For me Surface Pro is a good enough tablet combined with a good enough ultrabook, so it saved me from buying two devices.
