I think the initial mistake with the Windows RT was the name and the price.
1. Price - HP made the same mistake with the touchpad, which I owned and loved. The IPad can sell for it's price becuase as a content consuming device it has the content. Windows RT currently is limited in this respect. We then run into a chicken and egg situation, how do we get content without developers believing the sales potential is there. With this in mind Microsoft should have taken a hit on the initial price, the current price is what it should have initially been released for. This was they get the sales in, the user base is present and developers will produce the apps.
2. The Name - My wife runs IT for her school and she just purchased 20 Surface RTs as a result of the Microsoft education deal. The one remark all her colleagues say is that "it's windows, why can't I install windows apps??". Microsoft should have called it something different, maybe just RT, this way by name it's a differentiated product.
So my opinions on the device -
1. Lag, slowness, delay: I've been playing with my wifes for sometime and I have to say an excellent product, and I haven't experienced any issues. We all have to remember that this is a 1st Gen product so it may have a few niggles. Remember the iphone not having copy and paste, or the ipad not having true multitasking.
2. Multitasking - excellent, what can I say. We've got one other RT running 8.1, and the dual screenn mode, dual app on one screen modes are excellent.
3. Office - Excellent, not more I can say. Works really well.
4. Hardware - excellent quality, really really good.
5. Multiple User accounts and family friendly security features - For the education market this device is perfect. You can have multiple user accounts, share apps between users and it provides parental controls to limit applicaiton usage, device usaged based on time and a whole host of other features. This is out of the box, something the Ipad and Android just doesn't have.
6 Full USB Support and device support - plug in a keyboard or pendrive. Case rested.
Overall I think it's an excellent product that deserves its place in the market. It's an content consuming device, we need to remember that's the use case for tablets. Content creation, though not limited to tables, is a secondary services.
Apps .... the dreaded lack of apps -
When people say to me there's no apps my first response is, what's the purpose of apps? why did apps even come about in the first place?
Apps essentially provide a touch friendly delivery method for mobile websites or desktop applications. Now RT has IE10, it's not the best browser in the world but it is a FULLY fledged browser, with full flash experience. So for example, there is no Spotify app on RT but you can use the web based Spoitfy function in IE10. The point is for most missing apps just use the website. It works and you probably get more functionality. I will not deny that apps are better. The UI is specific to a touch centric device, but in the interim IE10 also works.
I'm very PRO the surfact RT. I think it's an excellent device. As a content consuming device it just needs more content specific to the device. This will come with time.