It’s a great price, considering that it comes with a full copy of Microsoft Office. This tablet is a laptop substitute, rather than the toy that the Ipad is.
For that price range, I would find a laptop more useful, but that is me.
That "toy" has a much larger ecosystem built around it and at the end of the day is going to sell far more units than the Microsoft tablet ever hopes to.
My Microsoft Rep was in my office last week touting the device saying it'd come in at a "very competitive" price compared to the iPad I had in my hands. $499 is competitive? In Microsoft's dreams maybe, but not in mine. I'd have run right out and bought one for $300'ish, but not $499. I'll upgrade my current iPad I to an iPad III instead, now that I know I'm not going to buy Microsoft's tablet.
I say that as a life-long MS guy who's made a very successful living building large enterprise class Windows environments and only acquired his first Apple device three years ago (an iPad I) as a fathers day gift. I use my iPad more than I use my laptop and desktop combined now.