With all of the discussion around Surface vs iPad vs Android tablets, a subtext throughout is the capacity of a modern tablet computer to be a useful tool for accomplishing different types of work.
One point in favor of the Surface Pro approach is that you retain the ability to run legacy Wintel applications so you can be as fully productive as if you had a standard laptop computer.
There are two subjects there that I’d like to address here since they apply to me directly. There is a large portion of my work that can be done entirely on the iPad, including remote management of servers via VNC, RDP or SSH. Document review, task planning, project management, schema design etc. In many cases, the iPad is a better tool that a regular computer.
But there are still some things that are exclusive to the traditional desktop environment as the applications in question currently have no iPad equivalent. Usually this is limited to heavy lifting applications like Xcode or working on web apps in Coda with lots of app switching as I test.
But in these cases, having the iPad as a second, autonomous screen is extremely useful, keeping documentation open in Safari or working through a tutorial in iBooks or a PDF file.
I find that the ensemble of the two types of devices so much more productive than just one or the other, depending on task at hand.
To this end, I’ve gone with the MacBook Air 11" plus the iPad 3 as the perfect combination. The total weight is less than most 13" laptops and takes up about the same amount of space in my bag.
On a regular day, I have both tools immediately available without any significant penalty in weight or size, allowing me to select the best possible tool at any given moment. But when I’m travelling, I find that I’m becoming much more confortable with just the iPad. I’m not expected to be as involved when on the road, so Diet Coda is more than sufficient for quick tweaks, combined with Prompt and Screens to complete the remote management toolkit.
I’ve also pretty much given up on doing a lot of work with photos directly on the computer since the quality of the iPad screen is so much better. Vacation travel is better served by the SD card adaptor and iPhoto on the iPad than anything I have on the desktop. That may change over time as Retina displays start arriving on the Air lineup, but until then the iPad is the absolute best semi-professional tool for working with photos while on the road. Adding in the Journals and publish to Flickr, I don’t need a full fledged computer at all.
I think that one of the biggest factors for many people is that they will be perceived as using a toy rather than a “real” computer. It’s not about the actual productivity involved, but more about how they will be perceived by others using this kind of computing device in a work context. This issue is exacerbated by the history of how computers were assigned. I remember vividly the newest computer going to the top level manager with his old PC getting redeployed to the next level down and so on. Traditionally, the higher up the food chain, the bigger and better your computer, which was generally in complete opposition to the actual computing requirements, which tend be inversely related to the position in the hierarchy.
I would venture a guess that in many cases, the more senior the manager, the more likely that an iPad is better adapted than a traditional PC. The developer in the trenches is going to be needing a more flexible and powerful platform. The side topic is that the mass of the tech press come from the trenches, or at least like to play in the trenches.
Something else I’ve noted along the way is that companies that have the internal capacity to do development (outside of the public facing startup world) are frequently fairly far behind the curve in terms of tools and skill sets since the bulk of the work is in maintaining legacy applications. Developing tablet based applications is pretty far outside of their comfort zone, whether they are Windows 8, Android or iOS.