When several of us Tech Digest writers were present at Bill Gates’s keynotes speech at CES in Las Vegas and saw a brief display of what we now know is Surface, which Dave announced earlier this morning, none of us realised it would be released this year. Heck, we thought we were looking at the sort of space-age technology that comes hand-in-hand with flying cars and bite-sized pills for every meal.

Instead, Surface will be released into the wild (well, commercial wild, anyway) this Winter, where T-Mobile, Starwood Hotels, Harrah’s casinos and gambling-company IGN will have first access to this exciting new way of computing…