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Microsoft announced pricing today for its top-of-the-line Surface tablet, the Surface Pro.

It’ll start at US$899, or US$400 more than the Surface RT tablet that’s out now.

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Unfortunately, that extra $400 also gets you terrible battery life.

In a Tweet from Microsoft that was picked up by Engadget, the company revealed that the Surface Pro would only get about half the battery life of the Surface RT. That means approximately 4.5 hours.

So, let’s recap.

US$899 gets you:

A Surface Pro with 64 GB of storage.

No keyboard. You’ll need to drop another ~$100 to get one of the special keyboard covers.

4.5 hours of battery life, which is pretty bad compared to many other laptops and abysmal compared to most tablets.

Yes, the Surface Pro is a full-fledged PC, powered by an Intel Chip. That explains the price. But how can Microsoft sell a PC without a keyboard/mouse? And compared to other portable PCs like the popular light and thin Ultrabooks, the Surface Pro has horrible battery life. Many Ultrabooks can last seven hours or longer on a charge.

No matter what you think of Windows 8, the Surface Pro is a horrible value.