Surface is a cool technology but it seems very cumbersome and obsolete compared to capacitive multi-touch screens and things like kinect. It's form-factor relegates it to only a niche of the potential market for touch-only UI computing. And that I think will ultimately doom it. Market forces alone make it more likely that Surface's niche will ultimately be filled by perhaps oversized Android or iOS tablets than by Surface itself.
RE: "seems very cumbersome and obsolete compared to capacitive multi-touch screens"
There are fundamental advantages that the surface technology has, but obtaining them (currently) requires the fundamental form factor disadvantage. These would probably balance out, but Microsoft has failed to capitalize on the advantages properly.
The advantages stem from the infrared camera hardware.
Advantage #1: Multi-user, not just multi-touch. You can see the direction that hands are coming from, even when they aren't touching the table. This lets clever software identify people, so that you could have UI pop up to face that person. Different people can do different things with multiple focal points and varying UI orientations.
Advantage #2: Identification of non-capacitive objects. For example, imagine a car customization app. The idea being that you'd sit with a salesperson and work through options together. Place a key on the table and a 3D model of the car that matched that key would drive onto the scene and then park next to the key.
Hopefully someone can figure out a form factor and price point that can capitalize on these advantages.
