I have powered up the Build Windows slate PC that is running Windows 8. It features a 64 GB SSD, 4 GB of RAM, and an Intel i5-2467m dual core CPU (with Hyperthreading enabled).
It does boot up near instantly thanks to the new Windows 8 fast boot and UEFI hardware. The setup was pretty simple. Navigation takes a couple of minutes to get a grip of (the dark bits of the screen are where you swipe for Charms or to go back).
The pen at the side gives you a sense of the size of the machine. It is around 10 mm thick.
A pressing question: can you enable Hyper-V on this hardware? Yes. A picture paints a thousand words:
Here I have a single VM running on an external virtual network that is natively connected to the wifi NIC. No more manually mucking around with bridging, or proxies! Dynamic Memory is also enabled. The SSD only gives you 54 GB of usable storage, with 36 GB free, so there won’t be too many VMs installed on this machine. I don’t see a way to open the case so I guess I won’t be upgrading the SSD anytime soon either. But … it’s a pretty nice machine that might put my iPad to rest for a while. We shall see in the coming weeks and months!