Yup the Xerox Star from PARC ran Smalltalk and was years ahead of the first Macs. Due to corporate blindness they never exploited the technology.
Apple copied it to develop the Mac. The Mac was designed with a GUI from the outset, they dropped the Apple II OS. MS took years to catch up because they grafted Windows on top of MSDOS.
The Surface looks like an interesting piece of hardware. The pricing will be critical, some of the Ultrabooks are below 1K now with a Solid State Hard drive.
A version of the surface that can run PC programs is very appealing especially if it can multitask.
The PC world has almost caught up to Apple in the Hardware category. The Ultrabooks are almost as attractive as Macbook Air, Apple raised their game with the retna display, nice for old eyes like mine. The Ultrabooks are very attractive however.
Then Dell has a 27in all in one with the same screen res as the 27in IMac and Visio is coming out with some all in ones that are very attractively priced and loaded with Win & without all the preinstalled bloatware other vendors have.