And on a Monday night in Los Angeles, sitting 20 feet away from Ballmer as he stood on stage to introduce Surface, a tablet manufactured by Microsoft, running a version of Windows 8 designed for a tablet user experience, with a built in kickstand and a magnetic cover that doubled as a keyboard, making the entire contraption look like a PCa voice tempted us.

It’s a thing of beauty – judging from photos, because we haven’t held the device – that not only protects your screen but opens out into a flat keyboard, saving you the extra expense of an external keyboard, which the iPad would require if you wanted to do extensive typing.

People buy tablets to consume media content, from online videos to movies, music and magazines.

If you want to use a tablet for writing your novel or putting together a company report, you’ll find yourself yearning for the more sensible notebook option.

If so, Microsoft’s flat keyboard is going to have to prove itself usable day in and day out, a tough task for such a thin tool.

Finding a homeTime will tell, but we have to wait because Microsoft displayed only one of the two models of Surface it intends to distribute, one being a Pro model with a beefier processor, and we can’t tell you much more because details of pricing and availability have not yet been announced.

If you think of an iPad tuned up toward Microsoft applications and conceived as a productivity tool, you get what we think Microsoft is after, but our suspicion is that niche is already covered by the various notebooks, ultrabooks and MacBook Airs out there.

Surface will have its audience, but we’m skeptical that the tablet format will ever emerge as the best place to get work done.

Meanwhile, we can await with greater interest the release of Windows 8, which will bring a major software design oriented around mobile devices and touch interfaces.

Instead of being able to run the promising Windows RT operating system for ARM devices, they will have to fall back to the forthcoming Windows 8 for x86 based devices.

But with Google’s new tablet also in the cards, we’re about to see whether the tablet can find a home in the corporate setting long dominated by Microsoft, or whether tablet sales will continue to be driven by apps and the entertaining content people can consume wherever they are.

Temeka Berry is a business journalist based in Shanghai, China. Temeka has a passion for financial markets and breaking news stories and loves writing about business news, stock market, and economic opinions that matters most to its audience. Temeka spends a lot of time discovering and researching latest financial markets and industry news stories in order to make sure the latest and greatest stories are brought to you first on BigBoardNews.com.