I tend to live in a bit of a Microsoft bubble and often wonder how people outside the bubble percieve Microsoft's offerings. I was pleased when I saw this post from design shop Effective UI describing their impressions of surface.
I think the Surface has huge potential! Imagine hotel lobbies, bars, restaurants, dentist offices, doctors, etc. Any place people are sitting with time to kill, the Surface could really make a big impact on the customer experience....Microsoft hasn’t always led the fold in UX, but Surface really is a very cool step in the right direction.
Judging from the content on their blog, these are pretty serious Flash/Adobe designer/developers. I got their via Peter Blois' blog, where he ported some control themes he found on one of the Effective UI guys blogs from Flex to Silverlight 2. Nice work Peter (oh, and I'm still a big fan of Snoop).