With the unveiling of the Microsoft Surface last week I was truly stunned. It looked like Microsoft had finally come out with something that “just works.”

I never paid much attention to Microsoft’s Milan project, which became Surface, because it seemed like they were working on a piece of hardware that other companies (like Apple) would do a much better job at.

Obviously at ten grand a piece it’s a little too expensive to expect consumers to have one of these in their homes any time soon, but there are some great applications in the retail and corporate world.

Microsoft gave examples of restaurants and casinos, but what about bars and arcades? How cool would it be to play ping pong or air hockey on one of these things!

I’m itching to learn how to build applications for this platform, but I wonder how complicated it will be. Can we expect the multi touch abilities to one day be built into Silverlight? If so will Microsoft allow competing technologies like Flash and Java on board?