Microsoft has its faults, the biggest one is not the features of their software or the Surface tablets but showing and telling people about their products. Apple has great advertising, Google is playing a cheap volume play (the Walmart of computers), while Microsoft is stuck in the middle trying to do it all. For those who appreciate having it all (features, functionality and options) will find the Surface and the software that comes with it a confortable transition from the the Windows desktop world. For those that have made up their minds based on Apple’s brand influence or Google’s low price Wallmart approach, I have nothing to say.

You miss the most important product point – the introduction of an ARM based device that can have an entire appsystem created for itself much like iPad did for itself. And you should not include the Android devices here since Android has no tablet marketshare and app development/usage share outside of the limited influence of Amazon tablets that are Amazon specific.

In short, wait for Microsoft to start slow on the ARM front – both Surface RT and WinRT OEM tablets – while it attempts to ready an army of developers to create a mountain of apps. Microsoft also has //build slated for Oct 29 – Nov 1 if you note it.

So the most important seling point of Microsoft’s Surface RT tablet will be known not when it is out but when commoditization causes Surface RT/Win RT tablets to be priced at $199 or $299 excluding the keyboard. My prediction is that Surface RT 2/WinRT tablets will start at $199 without the keyboard by middle of next year. That will be the real breaker for iPad’s margins.

Microsoft is clearly aiming at the enterprise tablet market with the Surface Pro/Win8 Pro OEM tablets. And they will be priced relative to the Ultrabook laptops which should have touchscreens attached in mass production by Oct 2013 which in turn will make them pricier in relation to the Surface Pro/Win8 tablet. So Surface tablets are supposed to be prefered to Ultrabooks for one reason – Ultrabooks do not have touch yet and if they have it, then they are costlier. Witness the low penetration rate of only 10 million Ultrabooks this year since Intel did not reduce its CPU prices and Microsoft did not reduce its software license costs. Expect the same to continue with the final result being the death of the low-cost Intel PC due to touchscreen costs and lack of Ultrabook commoditization by end of 2013 and importantly lack of Microsoft support.

So the whole exercise of Surface RT is to reduce prices in the consumer tablet market while Microsoft keeps the iPad 2/3/4 etc out of the enterprise market, replacing it with its own Surface Pro/HP/DELL/Lenovo Win8 tablets.

Essentially Microsoft is happy to have a smaller consumer marketshare but wants to keep the enterprise marketshare divided only among itself and the 3 or 4 other OEMs. No Google Nexus there. No Apple iPad there in the enterprise. Looking at it another way, the very fact that all or most consumer Windows low-end PC purchases will be Surface RT 2/3/etc tablets should create a new profitable consumer hardware division at Microsoft. This is also the reason why Acer is angry with Microsoft. It is their low-end PC lunch that iPad has started to eat and which Microsoft wants to share in though they were partners and still are partners on paper.

Surface RT could turn out to be the one of the best products in MS’s history, but I suspect we’re going to see a lot returns of these pre-ordered units, no matter how good it is. MS has–intentionally, I think–created confusion about this product and its OS, and that confusion may well come back to bite them on the ass. They’ve come up with two similar-looking tablets with the Surface name utilizing similar-looking but incompatible OS’s with the Windows name. People have been hearing about, and maybe even using, previews of Windows 8 for months, but MS is going to hold off on releasing the Surface that uses Windows 8 in favor of the one that uses Windows RT. They’ve filled the air with sloganeering about “no compromises,” and accordingly haven’t made much of an effort to alert everyone that Surface RT does feature some compromises–like your existing Windows software won’t work with a Surface RT, you’re going to be stuck in a walled garden for apps, just like with iOS, except this garden is much emptier.

Now MS is finally seeing it’s dream come true of true windows tablets, something which it dropped the ball on. But they can’t only release the WinPro tablets with full Windows 8 on them for a couple of reasons. 1) the technology isn’t there yet, 3 hours of battery life just isn’t going to cut it for the ivy bridge units. The cloverfield units are more interesting if they can get decent battery life, but it remains to be seen if the cpu can keep up with “real” windows programs, based on the Atom processor in this generations netbooks I’d guess probably not, but lets see. 2) Consumers are now used to having a computer for $499, it’s not a real computer, but it’s real enough to do email, video, internet, and some PC like functions. Do these people own laptops? If so will they sell their laptop and ipad for a surface Pro? Yes I think so, the ones who wont are the ones who only own ipads.

So the RT had to be released to compete in that middle area that Apple created and perfected. The area where your device isn’t good enough to replace your laptop and only costs $499. I don’t think RT will do very well versus Apple’s ecosystem and it’s insane number of apps, but really RT is only a stop gap until users realize that ipads, android and RT devices are not true PCs and while technology catches up and winPro devices have true all day battery life.