When I saw this my first thought was: We need something like that for Math / technical drawing.
I can understand that music is a good first application of this technology, but entering mathematical and engineering-related content through such an interface could be a huge deal as well.
OneNote does this. You can either insert a new equation and get an editor, or select existing strokes to convert (to either writing or math). There's sometimes error correcting involved, but it's pretty impressive.
Man absolutely, right now I'm filling up a blocknote really fast working through problem sets, trying to minimise paper by writing small, fitting many problems on one page etc. Would be lovely to use a digital pad and save each problem set on its own page and have an easy eraser tool.
Anyone used the Khan Academy app to brush up on some math? They've got a very nice handwriting to text feature to allow easy entry of answers on a mobile device, a pen would work great in combination.
I've been using Xournal for notes, problem sets, etc. for the last 5 years. It doesn't do handwriting recognition, etc., but I find that this is a good thing -- that way I don't ever have to go back and fix recognition errors, and unless you are preparing something for publication, typesetting math is a waste of time.
It's actually possible to LaTeX as fast as someone is narrating math symbols. Definitely not as fast as writing on a whiteboard, but on the same par as typing English.
Microsoft's iPad Pro demo showed drawing geometric shapes in PowerPoint. Reminded me of drawing in Flash but not quite as free form. I'd be very surprised if PowerPoint on Surfaces never got similar features. Maybe it does already? I don't have Office on mine.
I think math would require more error correction than music. Musical notation is pretty easy to get right, whereas math has a much larger symbol lexicon.
Musical notation can actually get really hairy even when restricting yourself to pre-20th century conventions. Another notation product currently in development has a very interesting blog that delves into some of these issues (http://blog.steinberg.net/ ).
Math, on the other hand, is actually way easier even including things like mapping diagrams.
I can understand that music is a good first application of this technology, but entering mathematical and engineering-related content through such an interface could be a huge deal as well.