Park your Surface next to your Zune, it's a zombie product. The RT version has no apps, and it'll be firesaled or landfilled and forgotten.
You know you might have a point about that lack of apps thing. The app store only has like 13,000 apps... so the devices are obsolete and should be land-filled, absolutely. The Mac App Store, that is. Of course, with whats happening with the Mac Pro, Apple are making great strides towards this.
The Microsoft app store is doing just fine. The in-use Windows 8 base will surpass the entire X86 Mac ecosystem late this summer. Thats simply a lot of machines for app developers to target. I don't believe that you comprehend how Modern apps work. An RT Modern app is precisely the same as an X86 Modern app, with the sole exception of a different compiler switch. Its utterly trivial to develop for both, so both versions get included in the Microsoft App store, and the correct one gets installed.
In 5-10 years when a developer does precisely the same thing, because its another minute of compilation at the end, all of the RT users will still be being supported. Just like the backwards compatibility in Windows since forever.
The Surface Pro is too heavy, too thick, and has ridiculously short battery life. People expect a tablet to be light and thin and have all-day battery life - like an iPad.
It seems like you are under the mistaken impression that only the OS manufacturer implementations of Windows 8 tablets count. There are plenty of W8 tablets that are thin, light and last all day. Particularly the Atom tablets. The Lenovo implementation is pretty awesome. The new Bay Trail Atoms will be heavily optimized for tablets, upping the already significant performance advantage that X86 has over ARM.
The Intel roadmap goes in cycles of 2. First new core technology is released, then they make it more energy efficient and tweak the chipset and surrounding technology. Windows 8 was released on the first cycle, so its mobile chips weren't terribly energy efficient (although the Atom's beat anything ARM in performance per watt by a mile.) Haswell is out this year and is going to allow for the same massively increased performance over anything ARM.. say like the Ipad, and yet improve the battery life to be all day (although there are existing iCore X86 tablets that can run all day, like the Samsung 700T, say.)
Here's the intel Haswell "North Cape" reference tablet hands on. They figure 10 hours of battery with an i7.
http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/25/intel-haswell-north-cape-hands-on-battery-life/
Windows 8 will slog on, but most people will get rid of the start screen. At that point you're basically running Windows 7 with a few tweaks (which was Vista with a few tweaks), and iTunes 11 is perfectly usable.
You don't have to get rid of the start screen, when including a start menu. You can have both. And people like having full screen touch aware apps, particularly with touch hardware... which doesn't have to be a touch screen. If your only experience of Windows 8 and a mouse, I can see how that might be a problem (there is a new learning curve,) but you can use a Logitech Touchpad T650 as well. Its fully gesture compliant including bezel gestures and makes windows 8 just as intuitive as on a tablet (and its really really easy to navigate on a tablet.)
Yes, you could also use it like Windows 7. You don't have to, however, and as more and more people transition to more touch-aware hardware, the more people will use the designed-for-touch interface.
The improvement I think Windows 8 most needs at the moment is on-the-fly automatic DPI scaling on a per-display basis, with API's for apps to control it too... but Windows is on a 12 month or so upgrade cycle now... so perhaps Blue.
