[MBCook]

The number one reason I see to pick Surface over an iPad is that it has Office. Many other reviews and commentaries seem to agree, and Microsoft has certainly made no secret of Office.

The idea of shipping a new platform, where Office is included and a core feature, with an unfinished copy of Office is crazy to me.

Bugs will be found, and I would fully expect that patches would come out in short order to address those issues. Bit allowing the device to ship with something labeled "preview" (Microsoft for beta) is a very odd decision.

I agree with other commenters that running office on ARM isn't an amazing feat. I ran Office 95 on a ~33Mhz 386DX. Office has have advanced since then, but still.

It seems quite probable the original article's author ran into some odd bug since I haven't seen that type-ahead compliant elsewhere. But the fact that bits of the out of the box experience seem to suffer so much on day one tells you a lot about where Surface was in its development cycle.

Why is Office (and some system settings) the only things that need/use the desktop in RT? Since 3rd party apps can't use it why not jut eliminate it? It's so odd that the flagship software doesn't it in with the Metro environment, often using classic controls like the touch unfriendly save dialog.

Surface needed to be Microsoft putting their best foot forward. It sounds more like it was rushed to meet some kind of ship target when it could have used at least a bit more polish.

[objclxt]

"The idea of shipping a new platform, where Office is included and a core feature, with an unfinished copy of Office is crazy to me."

I've got a Surface box in front of me, and it definitely says "Includes Office Home and Student 2013 RT PREVIEW", with a footnote saying a final version of Office will be available to download in the future for free.

This was also pointed out to me in person by the assistant at the Microsoft Store when I bought it. On the one hand it would be quite nice to have a finished version of Office, but I certainly didn't feel misled when I bought it. Not that I disagree with you that Microsoft should have released a final version, but I guess the priority was to get something out ASAP.

To pose what will surely be a controversial question here: if Apple can get away with selling Siri as a core feature whilst it's in beta, why can't Microsoft do the same with Office?

[MBCook]

It's nice to hear that MS is making the preview aspect clear to purchasers so no one is misled. That was a great thing to do.

I heard the Siri comparison brought up on a podcast I listen to (something on 5by5, don't remember which show). The theory they mentioned was that while Siri was certainly the feature they really marketed for that revision, it wasn't the core feature.

So a more apt comparison may be if the iPhone shipped with a buggy phone app that got updated day one, but that's not quite an apples to apples comparison. And Siri was a big reason people bought the 4S, just like Offixe is a big reason to buy Surface.

With Google, that's just their MO. They release early and often, that's just part of their experience. Apple (to my memory) hasn't done that historically, but seems to be going it more lately. Siri is the obvious example. OS X 10.0 could be considered a beta, but it didn't even boot by default on the computers it was pre-installed on. The new maps and Final Cut Pro x could be argued to be beta too.

I guess it's becoming more common, which is kinda sad.