I agree the tech is impressive, but a restaurant table that has built-in games? It's been twenty years since I ate pizza at the Space Invaders game table.

Also, I'm not playing that one-upsmanship game until Surface is actually released. Going by current sku count, it's Apple 4, MS 0 (And I guess Dell gets half a point for hardware without software).

yep, multi-touch makes much more sense in this kind of setup then on the small screen one have on the iphone.

btw, i was checking out that touchtable 84 article the other day, and found that they also have a smaller one called touchtable 45. the interesting thing about the latter is that its set up as a kind of drawing board.

that is, tilted at a angle so that if one have a office chair handy, one can sit down in front of it and work on it for a extended period of time. i would even hazard a guess that if one put a virtual keyboard on it, one could dump the mouse and just use gestures and the keyboard for all kinds of office related tasks.

http://www.touchtable.com/site/tt45.php

Hmm. Seems to me, one problem might be the fact that the more people are using the device the less of the screen anyone can actually see.

While the Surface is intriquing and we will no doubt have some sort of iteration all throughout our world at some point, I don't see how this one ups Apple.

Apple's strengths is the ability to create elegance and a percieved premium value for an unencumbered end to end user experience. Every other company keeps missing that point which is why they all fall so flat.

It's not the tech inside, it's how it is packaged.

What's the iPhone but a GSM phone packaged very well? It's all the same components to have a phone, Apple just made it look a jiliion times better and work a thousand times simpler by controlling the entire experience.

Microsoft will never, ever, ever be able to "beat" Apple with their corporate set up left at the whim and will of others.

Nor will they be able to beat Apple without a long hard look in the software mirror to make everything simpler, faster, easier which will probably mean leaving some folks on older formats behind.

Not to mention not having anyone (or department) that has the aesthetic chops to continually create good product design. If GBM can find all of these student designers who win design awards, why can't Microsoft?

So, while I live in an all Microsoft ecosystem by choice (desktop, tablet, windows mobile phone), I have no illusions of them one upping Apple at any time in the forseeable future.

MS is far from one-upping Apple. Apple ships products while MS pumps half baked ideas out to seed FUD into the market. It's the same thing they've done for years. Ship it, Then we'll care!