It sounds like it's already competitive in the market of nerds who draw cartoons on their computers, and need to be mobile. The Wacom Cintiq is probably much better for serious drawing, though you give up the portability of a self-contained tablet computer.[1] I'm not sure the Surface will succeed in any markets other than that though. It just solve any common problems significantly better than the alternatives.
I think it has pretty good potetial in hospitals, education and insurance where ability to take notes is important. Especially the use case where you are expected to stand and jot down things on a tablet sized device.
Those enterprises have already been well satisfied by the convertible tablets from Lenovo, Fujitsu, Panasonic, etc. for years. I don't think the Surface will make much headway into those fields, beyond the few people who are literally working in the field and not in offices.
I think the surface form factor is much slimmer than the bulky things I see in the hospital. This might be to the convertible tablets what Ipad was to the tablets before it.
If I didn't doubt Windows so much for programming stuff I'd really like to get one for university - looks like the perfect machine for lectures and also everything else I need a laptop for. For any students but CS I think it's awesome.
In my experience, I found that I was far more productive/successful in undergrad when I used Windows as my main OS and set up *nix virtual machines for the my computer science classes. Having the computer just _work_ and not needing to worry about software/configuration conflicts between classes was a huge improvement over trying to do everything inside of a single native OS.
That said, I now have a Macbook Pro and love that I have a native unix shell and MacPorts. But I still run virtual machines for specific projects (e.g. a Windows VM for all that software that just doesn't exist for OSX/Linux; unfortunately free alternatives don't work when you need to collaborate with a team).
Yep fair enough, Windows is a lot nicer to deal with but it just doesn't seem to have the same developer support. My alternative buy is definitely a Macbook but I do think the surface would be better for other student use cases - that said plenty of people on campus have Macbooks so it's not exactly a painful choice.
VMs are a good point and probably pretty much equalise things technically but OSX seems the better main OS for just doing work that happens to be programming/using developer tools etc.
[1] http://www.wacom.com/en/us/creative/cintiq-13-hd