Microsoft Invites Users to Retail Stores to Preview Surface Pro

You'll definitely void the warranty, although it may still be possible. Haven't been able to figure out one way or the other from any of the Surface RT teardowns.

Honestly, it'll have a USB 3 port, so it may really not be worth the trouble.

If you're using it for professional content creation, the current crop of touchscreen systems sucks.

If you're using AutoCAD and any recent version of Adobe CS, you're going to want 8GB of RAM and a discrete video card, preferably a professional one for certification with Autodesk software, or else you're just not going to see any real appreciable hardware acceleration in those apps because gaming card drivers don't support them.

You should be looking for a system with an NVIDIA Quadro or AMD FirePro graphics chip. Those systems don't have to cost a lot, but the problem is that you won't find any ultra-thin systems, and very few sub-$2000 touchscreen systems with them. If you don't care about those features, you'll be better suited to a larger professional workstation laptop, but also don't expect great battery power with those because they are workhorse machines.

If you buy a system with just Intel graphics, you won't be happy with the performance in your current apps.

AMD is supposed to have new professionally-certified APU's with FirePro integrated video (instead of the Radeon gaming series), but they have been slow to come out, and they only have them for desktop systems anyway. You'll want to stay away from AMD APU's in a laptop if they only have Radeon graphics for the same reason that you'll wanna stay clear of NVIDIA GeForce and Intel HD Graphics - your pro apps won't support them.

An large-enough SSD for a system is going to cost a lot, but if you're looking at a workstation laptop, many have 17" screen sizes and so the chassis will often accommodate 2 hard drives, so you could use an SSD for one and a large hard drive for the other.

About the size of the disk:

Yes, I realize she is wrong about the size, but always remember this about hard drive sizes:

Hard drive sizes were meant to be calculated in binary number formats - like RAM - because storage is storage, regardless of whether it's temporary storage (RAM) or more permanent like a hard drive. Sector sizes are also calculated thusly. It's only when hard drive manufacturers started getting into gigabyte sizes that they decided to redefine what "gigabyte" actually meant. Originally it was always supposed to be in binary (sometimes people refer to it as base-8) which is that every multiple should b e by 1024, but they decided to change the definition of megabyte, gigabyte, and terabyte to multiples of 1000 even though kilobyte still maintains the status of being 1024 bytes. Windows still calculates sizes based on binary too, so you'll never see the same size as what the manufacturer labels the drive. Hard drive manufacturers didn't back off from this re-defining of hard drive sizes, so the new terminology of MiB/GiB/TiB has been used to more accurately reflect the usable space, even though RAM has never had to meet this requirement.

What does this mean to the consumer? If you look at any multi-gigabyte or terabyte drive, the real size based on sector alignment (binary) is going to be ~93% of what the drive is rated by the manufacturer. For instance, a "320GB" drive is only ~300GB. A "500GB" is ~465GB. A "640GB" is ~600GB. A "750GB" is ~700GB. A "1TB" is ~930GB.

US and Canada only on February 9. More countries to follow.

The battery life indicated depends on what you're doing. It will go up and down depending on the type of activity and what you are connected to. My Samsung 700T tablet does a similar thing.