Sorry, but I still dont understand your point. Dual/Quad-core ARM chips of today running at 1.5Ghz blow away x86 based PC's from several years ago (I don't know exactly at what point) that ran Office XP quite happily.
To give you an idea, the system requirements of Office XP was "a Pentium processor with a clock speed of at least 133 megahertz (MHz)".
Besides, tablets are doing amazing things today, are we really saying an Office suite represents the pinnacle of computing power?
No, please, why don't you educate us all as to the deficiencies in ARM over x86 that make porting an x86 application to ARM some incredible achievement?
You seem to believe that ARM performs quite poorly compared to x86 (assuming similar clock speeds). Could you explain why?
It seems like if something could run on a ~166 MHz Pentium, it shouldn't be a surprise that a Tegra 3 (probably 1.5 Ghz or more) can run something similar. And older versions of Office ran on much less.
Even then, Apple put Pages on the iPad 3 years ago, so that should prove word processor like software could run acceptably on an ARM. The Surface is clearly much more powerful than an iPad 1.
> The fact that you have an ability to run a program like office on a tablet class hardware
Well, current ARM platforms vastly outstrip the performance requirements of, say, OfficeXP so "tablet class hardware" means nothing.
So the question is why do you find it impressive that MS got Office working on SurfacePro? In fact, it would be surprising if they couldn't. Sure, if they were emulating x86 code on ARM then it would truly be impressive for it to perform as well as it does. But this should be a straightforward port.
To give you an idea, the system requirements of Office XP was "a Pentium processor with a clock speed of at least 133 megahertz (MHz)".
Besides, tablets are doing amazing things today, are we really saying an Office suite represents the pinnacle of computing power?