I don’t see why the Surface wouldn’t be decent. I’ve got a ton of tablets as I test them for clients. I’ve never been asked to test anything on a Surface.
MS made the mistake of delineating Surface RT vs Pro incorrectly. They should have just made one model and then price by RAM and other options (broadband, bundled SW, etc).
Windows 8 should be sold as a desktop version and a tablet version. No one is asking for one OS that runs on both. While it’s nice and there are probably some corner case users who will actually take advantage of that, the fat part of the market doesn’t care.
My Win 8 machine has sat unused for months. I’ll probably break it out and update it when 8.1 is finally released - I see no reason to play with the beta’s. But I my win 7 desktop for heavy lifting, my Mac Air and iPad when I’m mobile.
I upgraded my laptop from 7 to 8 because I needed to make sure my apps would run on 8. For the most part it’s great, but they shouldn’t make you jump through hoops to boot to the desktop. The Metro interface is fine for tablets but pointless if you’re using a mouse.