I actually had the opposite experience.

It was the perfect device for going through university for me. I mostly used it for note taking and homework with OneNote. For something like proving my work with matrices I could just copy the last matrix, paste it, then replace the one column/row that I was working on and repeat. In that case, work that took other students an hour or more would only take me a few minutes.

Additionally, since it wasn’t just a tablet, I could run whatever software I needed on it for completing projects.

Of course a somewhat recent update from Windows bricked the device, and I haven’t gotten around to switching it over to Linux (like I have with my other devices). It does look like there’s a great group helping to support that transition though: https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface