Note, too, that the rest of Apple’s PC road map has lately been looking shaky. Apple’s latest laptops left many fans disgruntled, and the Mac Pro has gone years without an update. Apple is now moving quickly to address complaints from its high-end “pro” users — it says the Mac Pro will be redesigned, and a new Pro version of the iMac is coming later this year.

“I think Microsoft has recognized over the last couple years that maybe the creative community isn’t as locked into the Mac as many people think it is,” said Jan Dawson, an independent technology analyst. “There’s this window of opportunity for Surface to get in there — and even if that window closes with some of Apple’s upcoming devices, I don’t think Apple has that market locked up.”

Last month, I visited Microsoft’s hardware lab at the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Wash. I arrived in the midst of a renovation, finding a team of its best hardware designers sitting in a cavernous, mostly empty room — a scene that perfectly captures Microsoft’s approach to hardware.

Under Panos Panay, Microsoft’s Surface chief, the company has given its designers and engineers license to rethink the future of PCs in grand ways — to sit in an empty room, dream big things, and turn those visions into reality.

“We have this mind-set that says, ‘Hey, I’m going to take a shot at this, and if it’s not going to work, we’ll move on to the next thing,’” Mr. Panay told me. “That is celebrated — it’s always, ‘Let’s go, let’s move.’”

The mind-set has resulted in several shining ideas. For Surface Studio, Microsoft built a brilliant companion device called Surface Dial — a palm-size knob that sits on your drafting-table screen, creating a tactile interface with which to control your computer.

You can use Dial for basic things like turning up the volume. But in the hands of a designer, it becomes a lovely tool; you can scrub through edits in a video or change your pen color in Photoshop with a turn of the wheel. Like Microsoft’s digital stylus — which works across the company’s PCs and tablets, whereas Apple staunchly, weirdly opposes adding touch-screen abilities to its Macs — Dial is one of those interface breakthroughs that we might have once looked to Apple for. Now, it’s Microsoft that’s pushing new modes of computing.