Now I'm sure this will be downvoted to oblivion since im posting this to /r/surface but I wanted to give prospective buyers my experience with the surface.

I picked it up last night and was ecstatic to replace my iPad 3 with a more productive tablet.

Here are the pros:

Absolutely stunning design. Makes the iPad look like a toy not a tablet.

Kickstand/Keyboard are two of the best innovations on the device. I got the cyan touch keyboard and it was a great investment.

Windows 8 is the best tablet operating system hands down. I have it on my laptop and it is great and on the tablet it's just as good. The snap features really increase productivity. Being bundled with office 2013 is a huge plus as well.

Now the cons:

The display is an undeniable downgrade over the iPad 3. Cleartype is a good attempt to make the most out of a 1366x768 display but compared to the 2048x1536 screen on the iPad it is immediately noticeable. For reading and writing documents the screen really starts to show it's weaknesses and for me to 'upgrade' to a new device it is disheartening staring at a screen that has very visible pixels.

Now despite the flaws in the screen and the lack of apps I would still narrowly recommend this tablet over an iPad 3 to my friends...except for the biggest con of them all.

Performance.

I appoligize if I offend anyone here who loves their new surface but this thing is slow and there is no way around it. I took my iPad 3 and benchmarked some tests.

Boot Time:

Surface: 37 seconds iPad 3: 28

Now boot time isn't a big deal of course. I keep the devices on most of the time. Here is where it starts to get obnoxious.

Opening up the Music streaming app and streaming a song. (Both devices are freshly turned on so nothing is pre loaded)

Opening up spotify on the iPad and streaming a song: 8.3 seconds

Opening up xbox music and streaming a song: 44.9 seconds.

I have a subscription to xbox music since I was one of the first to purchase the tablet at my microsoft store so it has nothing to do with adds. The Xbox Music application is simply too processor intensive for the surface to adequately handle. If you check out task manager the CPU % jumps to 100% when you start using the music app and it shows. It is laggy moving between songs and searching for a song takes about twice as long on my surface as it did on the iPad.

After checking event manager logs I have had over 15 app crashes everywhere from the windows store to microsoft word. Word freezes frequently when trying to save a document and you have no internet access since it trys accessing your SkyDrive and fails. I have had problems with the office suite lagging behind while I am typing and having to wait for my text to appear. The surface is acting like a 5 year old netbook with limited ram.

Overall, Microsoft has the right idea with the surface. The only problem is it performs like an iPad 1...the next surface will be the best tablet on the market when it gets a highdpi screen and microsoft can iron out these performance kinks. Thats my 2 cents, if anyone has any other questions let me know.