Up until now, we've used tablets in one general way: consume content. We browse the Web, listen to music, watch videos, and play the occasional mainstream game. We all have our more specialized apps, too. From helping educate our kids to organizing wine cellars, finding the best deal at the grocery store, and controlling our home theaters, there is no shortage of ways we've found to use tablets.

But they also suffer a number of limitations, the most glaring of which is, ironically, their handy form factor. It turns out that having what amounts to a small monitor sitting in your lap isn't particularly ideal for getting stuff done (as opposed to enjoying all of those tasks listed above). Sure, there are plenty of folks quite adept at banging out emails on sub-10" displays dominated by on-screen keyboards. But for serious word processing, spreadsheet number crunching, and presentation creation, most of us would rather be in front of a good old fashioned PC.

The Surface piques our interest because it sets out to alter existing preconceptions about tablets. Microsoft is very deliberately working to convince us that it isn't necessary to take a tablet and notebook everywhere we go: its Surface should be every bit as competent at content consumption as its competition, with the added benefit of enabling productivity in a segment where it sorely lacked before.