Why does user have to be blind because they like these designs? Daniel Rubino said it himself....the odd thing is, it is windows phone users whining about these designs when non-windows phone users(aka the ones usually bashing windows phone) say they look pretty good. Irony.
Please don't tell me what I will do if a surface phone comes out? When I buy a phone I rarely pay attention to how it looks. After all I have owned phones such as the Microsoft Kin, Kyocera Echo(Dual Screen Android Phone...seriously look up how ugly it was), Motorola cliq, backflip and many other phone.
Why? I brought them because they looked cool/unique to me....not because they were pretty. I brought them for the FEATURES of the phone. For Microsoft Kin, I love the kin studio/spot(which they would bring it back to windows 10 somehow) and I love pulling my Echo out and being able to watch a video on one screen and have a text message open on the other.
I had the xpera play which was ugly as sin simply because I could play playstation on it. It could have been way better designed and its camera sucked royally(this was Pre-lumia) but I got it for its features...not its looks.
As far as a surface phone, I'd get it if it had a better camera on Front and back than the new flagships and it brought something new feature wise.
Premium to me is not something made out of metal and is just pretty....Premium to me is something that sets trends(like the 1020 with its epic camera) or the 1st phablet for the windows phone ecosystem(Lumia 1520) that brought me my favorite phone.
Premium to me is being able to run new windows 10 features with no lag because it has amazing performance.
That is precisely why apple users stick with IOS.Not for a design but because Apple brings them a quality product that builds on what the previous iPhone brought them....even with its redundant design.
And that's what these Lumias likely will do...bring me new additions on top of an amazing Lumia experience.
Besides
I like my colors....and if a surface phone cant bring me colors like I have on my Lumia, then that kills a lot of my interest already.
Let people have their opinions without you labeling them negatively because they disagree with you. After all even with Samsung's cheap plastic designs up until recently, no one denied that a Galaxy S4 or S5 was a premium device even when manufacturers had begun using glass and metal by then.