[DaveNull]

Unless your business soley revolves around the Apple environment, then Pages and the like are worthless. Plus, on the iPad, pages doesn't come with it. You have to buy it, and if I remember correctly, you have to buy Pages, Numbers and what ever the PowerPoint equivalent separately. The RT CAME with Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and OneNote 2013 loaded. These are the beta versions, but once they go live, you get a free upgrade. On top of that, M$ Office is the most widely used programs of their nature. Apples version holds no real accountable percentage of the market on this. On top of that, I recommend on the iPad getting Quick Office as opposed to any of the other Apple products, at least you can trade documents with the rest of the world that way. Beyond that, have you ever tried to actually be productive on an iPad. I mean seriously productive, not just responding to an email. But making a whole spread sheet, or writing a report for a cost/saving analysis. It's a goddamn nightmare. As much as Apple tries to pimp the iPad as a production type of device, it just isn't, it is much more of a consumption device

So you do know that Pages reads and writes in Microsoft Word format, right? Doesn't matter much for me. I stopped using word processors a while ago after getting burned on format changes. Everything I do is in plain text written with Markdown (in either SublimeText, Notesy or Byword) that gets exported into any number of formats including Word, but usually PDF.

I see where you might be coming from on Excel, but anything beyond what I would do with a calculator I do using Soulver. If it's too complex for that, I probably want a 10 key anyway so I'll wait until I get to a proper desktop.

PowerPoint is a disaster. I'll take Keynote any day of the week and I think that if you do a non-trivial amount of public speaking it's worth getting a Mac just so you can use it.

As for this, I don't know what to tell you. You should have left XP for 7. 7 killed anything and everything there was to love about it XP. 7 does anything XP does, better, faster, and a lot more securer. At this point it sounds like the problem of change is your issue, not the OS. Please understand I mean no offense, but that is the only thing that makes sense to me as why you wouldn't have changed. As for how 8 holds up, I will reserve my judgement till I actually get to use it for a little bit.

I use XP very little at this point in my home environment. Just never got around to acquiring a license for 7. I use 7 on my big workstations and it's nice. Powershell seems like one step forward and two steps back, but that's my bias as someone who wants to do things like shell scripting and bash can't be beat in that regard. That's why I always install CYGWIN on the Windows boxes I use.

On my iPad if I really need to get into something on a Windows desktop, I've got a VM that lives in a datacenter so I can remote to it whenever. It's been months since I've needed that.

As for ports. There is a USB port for xferring data via external drive or flash drive, for mouse if you like, or full size keyboard, or for what ever else you have that uses USB. (Personal Note: This crushes iPad right here.) Second there is standard 3.5mm port for headphones and what not. Third there is a micro-HDMI port for all of your projecting/exporting to monitor/TV needs. In case you didn't know, HDMI carries sound as well. At least anything beyond the first model of HDMI.

Sounds like lots of wires. I was wondering if Microsoft had anything that came close to competing with AirPlay and it doesn't sound like it. I soured on cable type solutions for this after snapping a motherboard in two when I had my laptop plugged into my stereo and stood up while my foot was on the cable. Guess this gets back to the whole ecosystem discussion.

this is the way the new OS's will be built Call it Apple-esque if you like, but it seems to me that Apple calls everything Apple-esque and that no one has had an original idea except Apple, ever.

My short experience with that Win8 tablet leads me to say that nothing about it is Apple-esque and that's a really good thing. Metro is innovative and different...something that Microsoft needs. It's just unfortunate that they couldn't get everyone on the same page to release RT as a metro ONLY OS to push things a little harder.

By splitting the difference they're only going to discourage enterprises from upgrading depending on how much training they're obligated to give to their users.

Overall it sounds like the most compelling tablet to come out since the iPad that won't just disappear. I'm excited to play with the hardware, but I doubt that the stuff I use all the time will ever come over to that platform. Examples: OmniFocus, TextExpander, Instapaper, OmniOutliner. Each of those come from developers that have been focused on OS X for years. In the case of Omni, they were developers for NeXT.