This article gave me a new perspective on the Surface 2. The author does a side-by-side comparison against the Asus T100, which runs Windows 8.1, something the Surface 2 cannot.

Over the past week, I’ve had the fortune to play with both Microsoft’s Surface 2 and the Asus T100 Transformer Book. These are very similar devices — convertible laptops with detachable keyboards — except for one big and fundamentally life-altering difference: Where the Surface 2 is powered by Nvidia’s ARM-based Tegra 4 SoC, the Transformer Book has Intel’s x86 Bay Trail under the hood. As a result, while the Surface 2 runs Windows RT, the T100 runs full Windows 8.1. Yes, every program and game that you use on your Windows desktop PC also works on the T100. Steam works on the T100. Team Fortress 2 works on the T100. Photoshop works (surprisingly well!) on the T100.

A common selling point of the Surface 2 vs the iPad is the fact that you can have the desktop experience on the go, as opposed to the desktop/tablet model the Microsoft marketing folks assail. This is a bit of a crack in that facade.