back_by_demand :
Fat chance of a Surface mention, too many haters
Maybe with the Surface RT but, frankly, I've seen *tons* of positivity towards the Surface Pro line of products. The only gripe I continually see is price, but it's usually in the context of "that's a sweet unit - I wish I could afford it!" rather than "psh, overpriced garbage."
Also, in the case of Tom's, they covered the heck out of the Surface announcement events, so I suspect this is more of an oversight on their part, rather than a bias against the Surface line. You want to see a site that is biased against MS releases? Read the tech section of NBC. Every article I see mentioning Nokia phones or Windows tablets is "well, it has nice hardware, but the whole Windows mobile platforms are kinda lame" type mentality... Then they post articles talking about iPads as if they're the clearly most functional tablets on the market.
As for this idea of innovation equating with success, and reactionary products either leading to the product graveyard or at best maintaining a status quo, I can think of more than a few product lines that prove this at best a contextual truth.
Windows - reactionary to other GUI's coming into existence, and a smashing success.
XBOX line - reactionary to existing products and threat of set-top boxes to MS's OS's, and a notable success.
Android - even if it was in development before iOS was, it actually hit phones almost a year after, and quickly became a "me too!" operating system, largely emulating iOS's interface norms and app-store model. It became its own thing, but you'd be hard pressed to claim Google's initial push with Android as anything more than reactionary to the release of the iPhone - and now Android controls 80% of that market.
Samsung phones - almost the definition of a "me too" phone company, just trying to copy and gobble up what Apple carved out, and again, a smashing success.
Apple - all of their recent major releases were things they didn't innovate, but rather took existing ideas/products and modified them with a mind for selling points, and made *smashing* successes out of them.
I think a headset by MS has a snowball's chance in hell of being the market leader, but this whole stance of "innovation leads to success, reactionary products at best maintain the status quo" is utter poppycock. Plenty of factors have lead to reactionary products taking over the market, and more than a few truly innovative products fall flat on their faces or get slowly outpaced by their reactionary competitors.