they stink and are just placeholders until Panos' Surface Phone is released.
Here is something I do not understand: why do we think the Surface Phone is going to be the Holy Grail that redeems Windows Phone? From my experience, and from what I'm reading, it seems that the current problem with WP in general is not so much hardware as it is software and ecosystem.
By the time the Surface Phone is released, W10M should have a lot of its present bugs worked out, with hopefully a better ecosystem around it. These shortcomings are the current problem with the 950/XL as well (for the most part). When the Surface Phone is released, the 950/XL will have these same benefits. They'll be running the same OS, and I doubt the Surface Phone will have significantly better hardware. If better hardware is available by then, there will likely be an update to the 950/XL, but the 950XL has as good of hardware as is available on any phone at the moment.
In a nutshell, my question is this: what will the Surface Phone offer that the 950/XL (or their replacements) will not?