I think the Surface Laptop will excel in K-12 environments. My friends and I used to easily gain administrator rights on the school's computers back then, and to put it simply, cause trouble and annoyance for the school's tech guy (sorry if you're reading this). We even used to bring in portable versions of Unreal Tournament and Halo CE and have a LAN party in the middle of class.. This is why Windows 10 S is EXCELLENT for K-12.
However for university settings, it depends on what the student is studying. I'm sure for English/history/etc. majors, the Surface Laptop is a winner. Lightweight, great build quality (assuming), touchscreen, relatively affordable especially with the education discount.
But as a soon to be mechanical and electrical engineering graduate, the Surface Laptop itself would barely suffice, and the upgrade to full W10 is a necessity. There are so many Win32 programs that are required for each course. You'd fail out of the intro to engineering 101 course without W10 Pro or Mac OS X. (Of course there are computers on campus but that isn't the point)
My SP4 i7 is barely powerful enough for some programs, long MATLAB scripts will not compile and I'd have to soft reset. I mainly use it for OneNote, which it's amazing at, but do all my coursework on my desktop w/4690K.