1. It helps to make the tablet thinner.



One of the reasons bigger and fatter Wacom Tablet PCs work better than thinner ones is that they can use thicker and better sensor board. I think one of the reasons why Surface Pro 1 and 2 was thicker than most people would have liked is because of the extra depth needed for the sensor board layer below the LCD. N-Trig does not use extra sensor board, but just uses the projected capacitive touch layer for X/Y coordinate.



2. Wacom DID NOT want bigger Surface to have Wacom in it.



Recently Wacom has “requested” MS that they do not advertise Surface Pro 1 and 2 having Wacom tech. Indeed when you go to MS Store, now they will avoid telling you that they have Wacom pen in it..



This is because Wacom does not want Surface Pro from further eating into Cintiq Companion sales, which is not as good as they hoped (hence the price drop). The Pro 1 and 2 was eating into it bad enough at 10". At 12", this would be a disaster, so no more Wacom inside.



3. Hardware wise, N-Trig has caught up with Wacom:



The new Duo Sense 2 with v3 firmware is Very good. The pressure curve is just as responsive, the tip is just as sensitive, and temporal update rate is similar. And N-Trig’s design by nature has less parallax issues, and tip offset issues since the pen tip sensor is closer to the pen tip, and the sensor grid for X/Y coordinate is right at the surface of the tablet.



The only remaining problems are drivers, and software support.



Software support isn’t what you think it is. It is more subtle and entrenched. Most art software out there was first written when N-Trig did not exist, and they are tailored for Wacom’s pressure curve. This is why N-Trig feels a bit “off” with things like Painter for example. But with more recent apps with neutral pressure curve like Fresh Paint, they feel about the same.



As for drivers, if you use apps that already support Microsoft’s tablet API, like Manga Studio 5/Clip Studio Paint, then you are good to go. Just go into setting and flip the tablet settings. Even with things like Photoshop, things are getting better since now CS support Microsoft tablet API natively. We just have to wait for rest of the art app community to stop only supporting Wacom’s WinTab API.