September 23 has come and gone – Microsoft in fact did announce the Surface 2 pretty much as rumored. Faster processor, better battery life, docking station, etc. All interesting improvements and, according to the pundits, all necessary even if only a fraction of what is necessary. So, why am I remaining uninspired?

The answer may lie in what I am looking for in a tablet. I don’t do games, I don’t watch movies or TV on my computer, and I don’t really have any pressing needs for high-powered computing at the moment. I do expect portability – I like to use my portable device (at the moment, that would be either my laptop or my Windows 7 phone) to fill in down time or to document what I am doing. That might mean checking e-mail, Facebook, etc. or reviewing photos, doing a little Internet research, or making notes on a project. It might be in the backyard, it might be on an airplane, it might be at school.

Oh, I am not a terribly good typist and find typing to be an exclusionary activity, meaning that it generally interferes with trying to do other things. So, I will never use a laptop to take notes. I will probably use a tablet to take pictures only out of desperation. But, what draws me to Surface is digital ink. I like the idea of sitting with the tablet, jotting down notes, writing a few paragraphs, editing stuff, searching the web, etc. – all with a tablet and stylus, much as I have been doing with paper for all these years.

So, Microsoft has managed to offer two very interesting products but only one with the digital ink capability. What this means for me is that I can buy the Surface 2 (formerly RT) at a reasonable price and get all the compute power I need, all of the software I need, reasonable performance, and good battery life. But the same form of hobbled portability I have with a laptop – where does the keyboard go? Is the damn thing sliding off my lap? Can I close the lid and use a pad of paper to take notes?

Or, I can buy the Surface 2 Pro to replace some but not all of my desktop (in my case, it is really a laptop) functions and get true portability that works the way I do. Of course, this comes at a price: major dollars for the machine itself, add a Type cover, add a docking station when they become available (this will restore screen size and keyboard convenience when parked), add an external drive or two (remember, Surface is still memory-limited). Basically, I would be buying a new laptop for twice what we recently paid for my wife’s new laptop just to get the pen.

Why couldn’t Microsoft have included the digital ink stuff in the revision of the RT? A consumer-priced and consumer-capable device which offers true portability…