I finally bought one. A Surface Pro. I've been eying these babies from when the original Surface was announced. As someone who spends a reasonable amount on-site and away from his desk, having a powerfull tablet that could connect to my NAS on hand always sounded like a great proposition. Thing is, this was an offer I could refuse as long as a) the battery life sucked, b) the price wasn't right.
The first point was taken care of by the release of the Pro2, which boasted an at least reasonable battery life of about 7 hours. The second was resolved today, as I walked into the Fnac, which must be about the most expensive place to buy anything user electronics related, and saw that they were having massive sales on the surface pro 2. So I bagged me a Pro2 with 128gig SSD for €699, which is €180 below the suggested retail price. To add to the deal, a free Type Cover 2 was thrown in. And then Microsoft had this promotion that if the store clerk didn't inform you on their great Office deals (-€20 on Office if bought along a PC), you were entitled to a free year of Office 365 Home Premium. The store clerk I was talking to was pleasantly savvy on the matter of the Surface line, even the upcoming Pro3, but we were more talking about the product then that he was trying to sell me one. He didn't ever mention the Office deal. So basically I saved about €450 
I've just begun installing my software, so not many impressions so far. I tried the pen out for a couple of minutes, and it's a joy to use. The Wacom pen was one of the main features that drew my attention and I can really see this replacing regular pen and paper for a lot of stuff.
As for gaming, this thing is as powerfull as my 4 year old laptop, which I used to play Borderlands 2 on. Even better, if I get an HDMI out, I'll be able to use this with my desktop PC and Steam inhome streaming to finally get my PC gaming started. I just can't get used to gaming behind my desk, and now I'll be able to reach all those cheap Steam games from the comfort of my couch.
Overall I'm as happy as an Aussie who just got his internet cap raised by a factor of 40 and very glad I postphoned purchasing one all those times. I don't think I'll be seeing an as good of a deal on these any time soon. Also, congrats to my wife, for arguing against getting worse deals earlier on.
I have not used City Lense. I live in a relatively remote area of the country.
One thing to note, City Lens uses Wi-fi or your data connection i.e 3G/4G. So if you are out it will use the satellite and eat up your credit and your battery will drain quicker too.
With the maps or GPS you can save those to your phone to use offline anytime.
I have 3gig's of data connection included in my monthly bundle. I could never eat through those. I drove for 3 hours once while streaming music from my NAS to my phone and through my car speakers. It ate up about 100Mb.
But does City lense work as it should, or is it always a bit off? It just seems like such a futuristic feature I can hardly believe it would work as advertised.
I've tested it in the house, but that's not much use because it points to stuff 600 metres to a couple of miles away. I guess I'll try it out on the street at some point just out of curiousity. It's just gyro based, the GPS places your location, gyros position your view I guess. It seems to work like augmented reality, you're just looking a video view of whats already in front of you with some signs overlaying it. Seems to work. If I had a data contract I would probably use it.
Quick month-in impressions:
I'm still loving the Pro2 so far. I don't really use it much as a tablet like one would use an Ipad, but I blame that on the fact that I haven't joined global insanity over Facebook and F2P games.
battery life is good. Like I said, I don't use it intensively as a tablet, but up till now I've never had to run for the charger. I think I could easily squeeze 7 hours out of it while browsing the web and whatnot.
Screen quality is phenomenal. The black levels are amazing, and everything is very sharp and bright.
The Wacom digitizer adds tremendously to the tablet as well. Desktop mode is a delight to browse with the pen. No more icons the size of a poststamp just so you can prod them easily with greasy fingers. I can have everything scaled as I do on my desktop without having to fear pressing the wrong buttons by accident. Being able to just draw on a word file is so very handy, and the digitizer completely transforms OneNote from something I never used to the ideal sketchpad.
Raw power is also abundant. I've been using it 3 days a week to work away from home. Just plug in a USB keyboard, a second screen and a bluetooth mouse and I can use photoshop, autocad, sketchup like I would at home, with the etra benefit of a touchsensitive second screen.
The only downsides so far are that the magnesium case is prone to scratching and I wonder how savoury the type cover will look in 2 years time. That and that my charger broke after having droped it once. Oh, and good luck finding a decent case or folio for it if you don't live in North America.
Even when compared to the new Surface Pro3 it still holds up well. The 3 isn't all that much bigger, and most of it's models will have worce performance due to basically having the same components, but more pixels to push. The only really impressive part about the 3 in my opinion is how light it is when compared to the Pro2, even despite being larger.
All in all I haven't regretted my purchase even once. It's a great device that shows a bright future for how we will work and play in the future. I have worked with it on a train, I have taken it to clients to showcase designs and take notes, I have used it as I would a regular tablet to browse the web, I use it as a desktop pc in concert with a keyboard, mouse, and second screen. Frankly, if Microsoft keeps faith in the Surface Pro concept, I can see myself replacing both my Pro2 and my desktop with only a Pro7 or so in 4 years time.