They say hindsight is 20/20. Looking back, it’s now obvious that Microsoft had dropped a number of hints that the company would eventually offer its own tablet, which should have made their Surface announcement last summer much less of a surprise to industry insiders. It was way back in 2008 that Microsoft began showing off its similarly named Surface tabletop (now renamed PixelSense), hinting at the immense resources Microsoft was pouring into touch interfaces, gestures, and multi-touch input. It was at the Consumer Electronics Show in 2011 that Microsoft announced that Windows 8 would support system on a chip (SoC) architectures from ARM and over the next few months revealed more of Windows 8’s touch-optimized interface. Coincidentally, within a few hours of Microsoft’s announcement, NVIDIA announced that Microsoft’s demo at CES, which showed Excel and IE10 running on an ARM-based chip, was performed using a Tegra SoC. All the while, Apple had been disrupting the computing landscape with a couple of a wildly successful product lines, namely the iPhone and iPad.

If you step back and put all the of the pieces together, Microsoft had shown that the company was already investing heavily into touch-enabled interfaces, they said Windows 8 would support ARM-based SoCs, NVIDIA revealed that Microsoft was already developing software on a Tegra-powered device, and Apple—one of Microsoft’s arch rivals—was changing the way people thought about computing. Heck, even Microsoft's branding had technically been revealed as well.