The reality is that the vast majority of people do not need or want a tablet that is a full blown computer. It's almost a niche market. It might be a reasonably sized niche market, but niche none the less.
You know what we call a niche market that sells 400K devices at $1k+ per in the US alone in its first month(not including OEM sales)?
A very profitable market. The whole point is to make money and Microsoft just made a ton of it, with a lot more on the way as they open up territories and start getting traction with the new device line. At what point will you stop calling it niche? 1mil devices a month? 2?
The only problem that Apple is facing has been created by Samsung who have laid down the gauntlet with 7"-8" tablets, which have created huge interest in a smaller form-factor tablet. Add to that large mobile phones like the S III and IV, that are pretty capable in themselves, and the portable market is covered.
Oh, thats the only problem eh? Not the fact that the original ipad is winding down and going to be bounced out of the form-factor by the Surface Pro?
So that also creates a problem for Microsoft, as no one is going to be interested in a 7" Windows Pro tablet. What can you effectively do with it? You'll have a small screen, it's not going to be powerful, you won't have a good battery life etc. You might make a 7" RT, but then you're competing against an established market with more apps and peripherals than you can point a stick at.
You would make a 7" RT in a completely different casing and call it the Surface Mini. No hurry. Their mistake was they tried to do both at the same time. They should have done the Surface Pro and then once it gained traction they would have seen they needed a 7" Mini rather than a 10". Hindsight is 20-20, though. The nice part about the way it shook out though is RT really concealed the fact that the Pro was a completely different device line to those who didn't know any better. I doubt they really planned it that way, and i don't think they even had a clue how successful Pro is going to end up being. The whole thing smacks of a 'landing in a pile of s**t, and coming up smelling like a rose.'
And laptop and desktop users get ignored.
Pure laptops are officially dead in the water. I'm sure OEM's will still continue to sell to some extent, but it'll be a niche market
.
Desktop is still getting love from Microsoft as all of the advancements of the touch have been carried over to it. What the Desktop really needs to survive though is to make the next big leap in capability with applications that can take advantage of that and differentiate it from Mobile processors. Something like the Xeon Phi PCI-e Teraflop cards being used in regular PC's to severely boost computational ability.