The Surface Pro looks like a tablet. It can work like a tablet. You can hold it in one hand and draw on it with the other. It even comes with a plastic stylus that works beautifully.

But inside, the Pro is a full-blown Windows PC, with the same Intel chip that powers many high-end laptops, and even two fans to keep it cool (they’re silent). As a result, the Pro can run any of the four million Windows programs, like iTunes, Photoshop, Quicken, and, of course, Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

The Surface Pro is beautiful. It’s clad in matte-black metal, beveled at the edges like a Stealth helicopter. Its connectors immediately suggest its post-iPad capabilities, like a memory-card slot for expanded storage. The screen is bright and beautiful, with 1080p high-definition resolution (1,080 by 1,820) — but when you connect the tablet to a TV or desktop monitor, it can send out an even bigger, sharper picture (2,550 by 1,440). There’s one USB 3.0 jack in the tablet, and a second ingeniously built into the power cord, so you can charge your phone as you work. Or you can connect anything you’d connect to a PC: external drives, flash drives, keyboard, mouse, speakers, cameras and so on.

Image Credit... Stuart Goldenberg

Are you getting it? This is a PC, not an iPad.

As though to hammer home that point, Microsoft has endowed the Surface Pro with two unusual extras that complete the transformation from tablet to PC in about two seconds.