Interesting perspective, thank you.
Our experience with Windows 11 based models of the Pro X is that the differences aren’t as dramatic. Running the OS itself, Office or most of the mainstream productivity apps, you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference between the SQ1 and the i5 in aggregate.
In other words, some things are slower, but some things are faster. Doing OS things, WOA is just a beat faster actually, and initial loading of native apps like Office is a bit faster too.
And Edge is actually faster across the board with WOA, though by a small amount.
Where the SQ1 falls down with our customers is most graphic apps and Photoshop especially where the vast majority of the code is still X86 based.
Games are also pretty poor, compared to even the I3 version of the Pro 8. But OTOH the ability to run games well is not what the vast majority of companies buy systems for.
As to imaging the device, that’s a valid point with a couple of large caveats. First of all, you can put the blame squarely on Qualcomm, that that’s not possible.
But OTOH for almost all our customers, that is a non-issue as they use active directory to manage their systems, Intel or WOA, so the process is the same and WOA machines can be “rebuilt” slightly faster actually.
IMHO the biggest issue with WOA is perception and execution and MS has done an absolutely terrible job on both fronts, especially in evangelizing the development community to update and make native their apps.
As an aside to that, even with a company as large as Adobe, finding an engineer that is truly knowledgeable on ARM/WOA is a significant challenge, though it is getting better as Apple with the M chip has “forced” them to get up to speed and there is a lot of crossovers between the two platforms.
Finally, any new Surface device is likely to have the Snapdragon 8CX gen 2 or possibly even the gen 3. I can’t share details due to various NDAs, but the gen 1 running some customized Linux builds is an impressive bump over the SQ1/2.
So TLDR, I still believe in the midterm there is still lots of runway for significant advances in performance as Apple has shown with the M chips. But Apple has an enormous advantage there which MS simply can’t counter, which is that the only source for a Mac is Apple, so Apple can and does dictate technical changes to the platform and forces developers to move with them or risk being left behind.
And here’s an anecdotal perceptual thing about each platform. When an app doesn’t perform well, or isn’t native on a Mac, users blame the developer. Conversely users blame Microsoft under the same circumstances.
And finally, there is an enormous perceptual problem for WOA to overcome, even among many here, (looking at you @dstrauss 
) due to the absolutely disastrous launch of WOA where they hinted at core I5 levels of performance but where in reality the only time that applied with was cherry picked, optimized and NATIVE benchmarks. Whereas the reality of more general users was that virtually nothing was native at (including MS own apps) for over a year after the launch.
And of course, now MS is stuck with the truism that perception is reality, though that perception is seriously outdated and, in many cases, misinformed in mid 2022.
So my tome of the week…
