The current use of "Surface" itself is an example of Microsoft watering down a brand in much the same way; it might be careless but it's absolutely consistent with Microsoft's past behavior.
Surface originally was a large windows tablet that doubled as a "table" it also had fancy sensors underneath that allowed you to do a couple of cool things and other way cooler things that never came to fruition.
Seems like it would have died off as a huge blundering $10k per table mess by Microsoft. Or as a badly thought out Windows RT Surface tablet. I would have liked another Surface table (one that actually got better support than a few WPF/Windows widgets) but I'd say now Surface is a huge brand for Microsoft with laptops/desktops.
Sure, it's a broader brand, but one with less coherent meaning; the same that would be the case with moving Pixelsense to a generic label for high-reoslution displaces rather than a specific mark for displays with, among other features, close-range camera-based object recognition.
In fact, there's a fairly close parallel between the broadening of the two brands between the two since Surface was originally the brand for devices incorporating Pixelsense, which was the brand attached to the combination of particular UX technologies, including the camera-based object recognition.
Especially here as you see the Dial incorporated into a Pixelsense environment, it's a very interesting start to convergence between a lot of the things explored and prototyped on the old Surface tables converging into the new brand. A lot of the concepts of the Surface Studio feel very much like more polished concepts "back" from the Surface table. The drafting desk form factor of the Studio very much echoes the tables, only smaller and more convenient.
