Microsoft lived up to the mystery and the hype last night by introducing Surface, a line of two 10.6-inch tablets targeted directly at Apple’s iPad. The Surface not only marks a bold new strategy for Microsoft, as my colleague Kevin C. Tofel discusses here, it also offers the design (including a nifty-looking detachable keyboard) and software (Windows) that might make it a legitimate replacement for PCs, rather than the complementary device the iPad is generally viewed as. There are still many things we don’t know about the Surface — the all-important price point is still a mystery — but Microsoft may finally be positioned to leverage its dominance as a developer of PC software in the tablet world. Which is something its manufacturing partners have somehow failed to do.