Right, at least the bad trackpad is offset by the fact that you can touch. The need for apple-level trackpad is offset by the fact that you can manipulate pages with your fingers, instead.
And from what I've heard and used, both the touch and type cover aren't "awful" or "terrible". They're not 'good' either, but I'd certainly put them in the 'usuable' category. Would I write a book on it? Hell no, but I'd also be tempted to swap my mac's chiclet keyboard for a mechanical keyboard anyhow. There is certainly room for improvement, but people in HN seem to have an particularly high disdain for the surface's covers... they're not the demon they're made out to be.
I think you slightly misunderstood me. I think the cover is pretty awesome. To me it seems like a winning combination with a $500 tablet. But a $1000 tablet/ultra-portable with the keyboard and trackpad? Is that the right trade-off to make?
If the products competing here are $1000 ultra-protables with pretty great keyboards and $1000 tablets with crappy keyboards, which has the bigger audience?
What is the most accessible creative occupation? Writing? STEM fields? Or drawing? We could draw before the written word existed. We could write before we created more abstracted languages like modern symbolic math.
I think the end game is to include high resolution, precise, accurate stylus input, a'la Wacom technology or something like it.
I cry a little every time I see a Microsoft product with Wacom built in and an equivalent Apple product without it. What I'd really like is something like a Surface 2 running Ubuntu or SuSE, but with an Apple-worthy battery life.
Maybe it can be done beyond the niche. My current guess would be no but I’m not super sure about that. Admittedly, do not expect any great insights from me in this regard, all I’m going on is that drawing (with a stylus) has been a (pretty big) niche application in computing for a very long time now and always nothing more. It’s useful for some people, but very far from everyone. Maybe that can change. Actually, I don’t really doubt that (look at all the previously niche-tech that’s in current smartphones because it became cheap enough and that had to find its mass-market applications first, stuff like gyroscopes) but I’m not sure whether it’s the Surface Pro that will do it.
But it has, admittedly, a better shot at doing it than anything else that came before it.
And from what I've heard and used, both the touch and type cover aren't "awful" or "terrible". They're not 'good' either, but I'd certainly put them in the 'usuable' category. Would I write a book on it? Hell no, but I'd also be tempted to swap my mac's chiclet keyboard for a mechanical keyboard anyhow. There is certainly room for improvement, but people in HN seem to have an particularly high disdain for the surface's covers... they're not the demon they're made out to be.