A very viable alternative
Although the digitizer integrated into the Surface Pro would be a welcomed accessory, at least one viable alternative seems to address most of Surface Pro's short comings while maintaining nearly all the advantages. I am speaking about the Acer W510 with the keyboard option. The initial package can be acquired for around $700 USD. And while it comes standard with the basic Win 8 variant, I upgraded it to Win 8 Pro. Adding a 64 GB Micro SD XD (repartitioned to allow full use) results in a very useful device. Total system cost, about $800.
With the keyboard attached, it weighs about as much as a netbook, but when detached the tablet really doesn't seem to weigh all that much more than my wife's iPad and I personally find it more comfortable to hold. The pivot of the keyboard attachment swings all the way back, providing an integrated easel for the tablet making it a nice display.
The native Mail client is nicely managing 6 email boxes (including Enterprise Outlook). Office 2010 installed without a hitch as did my CAD software. Internet access required a bit of a learning curve and neither of the Internet Explorer applications worked in all situations, but that was fairly quickly resolved by installing Firefox. Really, the environment is as robust as what you would expect from a Win 8 system.
Is this solution as fast as my notebook computer? No, but it certainly weighs less, is actually a lot more portable, and unless you are doing some serious crunching, it appears capable. As an example, being in a hurry one morning, I accidently left my laptop at home and was actually able to work the whole day using the W510 on the guest network at the office. I missed some of the files which were on my laptop but managed to make it through the day by accessing email attachments and cloud storage without suffering all that much. Keystroke errors also increased, but since I normally use a natural keyboard I can say the same when I am typing on the keyboard of my ThinkPad. What is noteable, the combined battery life (keyboard and tablet) was more than sufficient to make it through the day and still have power to stream a video on Netflix that evening without recharging.
While this particular solution will ultimately be eclipsed, I think it demonstrates that technology workers unquestionably have viable alternatives to iPad / Android tablets with very little downside.
Win 8 Pro tablet computing will be different than using a desktop or full featured laptop/notebook, and it might not be as "popular" with the broad public, but it neatly fills a niche in a way nothing else can.
