Surface is a tablet which can also run Photoshop, AutoCAD, MATLAB, Visual Studio, Flash, and whatever other weird legacy apps are kicking around. It can multitask. It has a proper digitizer. It has a kickstand and a very innovative cover. Yes it's not a laptop. No it doesn't have the Android store. That doesn't mean it's useless.
(P.S. just noticed my hacker news account is 1337 days old today. wheee.)
Adobe and Autodesk all have multiple apps on iOS. How many Metro apps have they released? That's the metric that counts when we're talking about tablets.
All the software you're talking about only really works in desktop/laptop mode with a mouse. As long as that is true, MS will be an also-ran in the tablet space.
They don't really compare well, iOS versions lack a lot of important features in comparison with the windows ones.
>" How many Metro apps have they released? "
I believe the point is they don't need to, they desktop software runs just fine.
>"All the software you're talking about only really works in desktop/laptop mode with a mouse"
Not really, all those apps actually benefits from the use of a stylus (actually artist prefer that more than using a mouse) and that's something that you can't really do with an iPad (I own an Ipad2 and I had really tried hard to do anything productive on it without luck)