Farhad Manjoo cheers for "Surface":
Many of its traditional PC partners—Samsung, Asus, Dell, and HP—have already tried to take on Apple with rushed, ill-considered, cheaply made tablets. Microsoft would have been foolish to rely on that gang of losers to create tablets that were worthy of the new Windows. With the Surface, the company is taking its future into its own hands.
Kevin Drum homes in on the product's key feature:
[T]he most important aspect of the Surface tablet — by a mile — isn't that Microsoft is paying a bit more attention to hardware. It's the fact that the Pro version is both a tablet and a real computer. This is huge, and it's huge whether you're an Apple fan or a Windows fan.
Jesus Diaz is excited:
If it fulfills its promise, if Microsoft Surface Pro is $800 or $900 and can pull six or seven hours of battery life, then things will change. It's going to be hard, since they don't have the app ecosystem yet, but that will come eventually. Microsoft has the user base, the developer base, and the deep pockets to make sure of that.
Matt Novak less so:
The response time when touching the Surface screen feels just a millisecond longer — and comparatively, the flip from vertical to horizontal feels like an eternity. The user interface is, again, perfectly acceptable in the limited amount of time I got to play with one. But it felt 10 percentage points from wonderful. I suppose these are the minor details you notice when you’ve been using Apple products pretty much exclusively, but that's precisely why they matter — most people have only used one other tablet in their lives, and that tablet is an iPad.
The Dish 