Will the surface laptop fulfil all needs of college students?
It's going to be awesome for students, it's going to handle everything they need - reading a lot of materials on High DPI screen, perfect for writing, touchscreen and a pen for adding some quick notes into the PDFs, great screen and audio for Netflix. Also every student goes through a stage of creativity and it's good for working with photos, audio, even some light video editing should be just fine.
The only limiting factor here are the available applications. But that's just a matter of time.