The Surface Go is not a laptop. It's the first Surface in a long while that's built primarily as a tablet for consumption and entertainment purposes over being a straight up laptop replacement, and that's going to be the Go's biggest pain point due to Windows 10. A good tablet is about more than just good hardware, you need a good OS experience to go along with it. Unfortunately, Windows 10 doesn't have a good tablet experience to offer, not when compared to iOS on the iPad at least. It wasn't always like this, though. Back in 2014, Microsoft had an excellent OS for tablets known as Windows 8.1 that was built from the ground up for touch-first experiences. It wasn't so great on desktops, but was an interesting new way of interacting with Windows on tablet based devices. The original Windows 8.x tablets were before their time, thanks to both design and software experiences that were fast and fluid, beautiful, and animation heavy; everything you'd want from a tablet experience for consumption. See at Microsoft The tablet experience on Windows 10 is nothing like this. It's bare of any animations or gestures, and it most certainly isn't as beautiful as it used to be. Its biggest problem is that it's very obviously a desktop experience that has been poorly optimized for tablets. It still has a taskbar that's only there so that you can go back to Start, any animation it does have are just fade effects with no real flair to them, and many of the apps, such as Edge, aren't really optimized for tablets at all. On the iPad, everything flows together. You tap on an app icon, and that app icon floats in to fill the entire screen. To go back, you just swipe up from the bottom of the screen and the animation follows your finger until you drop it back to the home screen. It's a beautiful experience and is all part of why the iPad is such a good tablet. On Windows 10, tapping an app icon on the Start Screen initiates a fade effect, which just isn't as nice. To close an app, you just tap on the Start button, and the app fades away again. Not intuitive at all. And that's without evening mentioning the bugs. Windows 10's tablet mode is full of bugs, especially around the keyboard. It's not as reliable, and crashes way to often for a keyboard; an important part of the tablet experience. I often find myself having to tap things twice before they activate too, especially on the Start screen. Microsoft has nailed it before

Back in the Windows 8 days, the tablet experience was super gesture based. On tablets, gestures are the best way to go about things because they're so easy to do. On Windows 8, you could swipe in from the right on any screen to open the Charms Bar, which would have different options for you that were contextual depending on the app you were in. To get to multitasking, you'd swipe from the left. You can still do this in Windows 10, but the experience has been severely mutilated. For example, on Windows 8 you could swipe in from the left, and your previously opened app would follow your finger. It'd be stuck to it, making the user feel like they were in control with what they were doing. From here, you could quickly swipe back towards the bezel to see all your open apps or flick the app to the right to switch to it. On Windows 10, this experience is nothing like that. You swipe from the left, and a fade effect throws you into Task View. There's no fluidity here. On Windows 8, the gesture interaction responded to your movement, but on Windows 10 it simply acts as a shortcut to Task View. There's no connected animation that connects the gesture to opening the Task View UI, you just swipe and then everything fades to Task View. It really sucks. The lack of connected animations is one of the biggest reasons why Windows 10's tablet experience feels so rough. It just feels unfinished.