This is revisionist thinking and shows your own bias that you accuse me of.
You have a review of every single Microsoft product. I have to ask - what is your experience with Office 365, Hosted Exchange and Azure?
What tasks can you do with an iPad and not with Surface and vice-versa?
Flagship Windows Phone 8 (i.e. Lumia 920 or Lumia 928) is better than an iPhone. I've owned 3 iPhones - how many Windows Phone 8 flagship devices have you owned?
I, like nearly everyone on the planet, have never owned a flagship windows phone. I have no reason to own one. It doesn't matter if it is better than an iPhone or not - nobody buys them because nobody wants a windows phone. It's probably just a branding issue at this point, but branding is very important.
Irrelevant to the mobile phone market itself, but I would personally never buy a locked down windows phone as I enjoy hacking my phone to do strange things / connect to strange devices - and windows phone just doesn't offer that. I was previously very involved with windows mobile which was gloriously open and far more hacker friendly than windows phone. It's a pity MS discontinued it, the HTC Universal was one nice piece of hardware.
Office 365 is a decent product, I don't have any issues with it except for the marketing strategy (I disagree with cutting off the channel).
We run hosted exchange through intermedia at my office and other than some occasional issues with syncing, we don't have problems. It's certainly a bigger headache than Google Apps, but it's what we started on and it's not enough of a pain to get us to switch.
I have not used Azure personally, but have friends who operate fairly significant infrastructures on there. They've no complaints about the DC (except for the ridiculous SSL incident) but more about things like provisioning times and support responses. This is hearsay though so take it with a grain of salt.
You can do everything you can do on an iPad on a Surface, but the surface is visually unappealing, priced too high and not user-friendly. Those things matter a lot more than they used to; Microsoft needs to understand that the facts on the ground for product development have changed.
The Lumia 920 is not better than the iPhone, I don't know what criteria you could possibly be using to come to that conclusion. That's pure fanboyism, IMHO; I mean they faked the photos for the launch of the phone!? It doesn't get much worse than that.
I have a background in wireless and have used almost every version of the Windows Handset family. I can tell you that the process manager used to be the problem, along with the user experience, but today the issues are cultural as much as they are usability. Microsoft has a culture of adding options to menus and throwing in the kitchen sink; there's no product development because everyone is operating their own Fiefdom. Very similar to the culture at AT&T.
The only thing you 'need' to use is the Start Screen, but that should be a rarity since you should have the majority of your familiar programs down on the bar. Moreover, even when you need to use it, you use it the same way you do in 7. Just hit the windows key and type away!
My one complaint would be that the settings are a bit of a mess. There was clearly a rush to make things accessible from both the Desktop and Metro side of things, and as a result the settings can be kind of odd to find/navigate.
If it could really be disabled (and the disabling was supported by Microsoft instead of in spite of them) I'd agree with you, but it actually can't. Or at least Microsoft has gone obnoxiously far out of their way to ensure you will continually invoke it by accident, even if you tried to turn it off.
For example even after installing classic shell, random videos and photos still open the metro UI - full screen in all its glory. I also often end up falsely triggering the multitasking gesture (swipe from left=>right across trackpad). And the wifi-control panel has been turned into a brain damaged metro simpleton. And in 8.1, searching my start menu is going to return Bing results even if I was only looking for a file on my computer. My documents are going up to SkyDrive by default even though that might violate my privacy, cause me to break the law in certain industries that are regulated, cost me bandwidth or just plain be against my wishes.
If I had one word for this Windows release it would be "disrespectful". Because Microsoft has put all their own needs ahead of my own. In their selfish desire to promote their own products they have essentially become the bloatware that infected all their PCs and used to be the fault of the OEMs.
Surface RT is just the worst form factor for use in bed; the iPad is 10 times easier to hold in portrait or landscape, not to mention the high res screen looks much better than the Surface for close up in-bed viewing (RT again, I don't have a Pro). The Surface seems to be useful for Office when on a table where the keyboard can be used, but that is not part of my usage habits.
I see how Surface is cool, but the iPad still provides a better experience for my personal use cases. Haven't tried the Pro, but I already carry a laptop around for coding.
> Flagship Windows Phone 8 (i.e. Lumia 920 or Lumia 928) is better than an iPhone.
My 920 lacks apps :( Even Facebook and Skype are missing from the market my phone is locked too. I keep an old iPhone 4 (bought in the same region, ironically) in my bag for apps. Otherwise, the 920 is a wonderful phone.
What market is that? My 928 has both Skype and Facebook installed on it from the Windows Store. I'm guessing you're outside the U.S. but I'm curious just where you are and why you don't have access to the standard apps in the Windows Store.