>although I imagine trying to walk the average user through "booting from USB"
How is that any worse than the current status quo of every Windows product ever sold? I'd say it would be harder to walk mom through deleting the restore files when she calls and says her tablet won't hold all her movies and music.
Let's just face it, MS made a very stupid decision. I could see this happening during the Vista era, but SSDs have been mainstream for YEARS now. Windows should have a smaller footprint and holy hell, should not have a 12-18gb cab file to restore from on limited storage.
Enthusiasts spend way too much time making Windows SSD friendly. We need to delete superseded update from winsxs, shrink the default massive page file, delete the hibernate file on machines that don't need it, manually stop superfetch/defrag even though windows is supposed to do this on its own, etc.
>And the "purpose of the surface pro"?
In the age of affordable ultrabooks, who knows. Essentially you're buying an ultrabook without a keyboard and with a super tiny screen.
That said, I love the RT product and if the RT tablet was $299 it would sell like hotcakes. Especially if the 'desktop mode' didn't exist. MS should never have bothered with the Pro line and instead should have made a proper android and ios competitor.