For a similar price to the Surface RT you can pick up an Asus VivoTab Smart, difference is that it is similar size tablet (and battery life) but uses an x86 CPU so it has the full version of Windows8 rather than the restricted version on a RT tablet.
What does that all mean? Full version of Office will run on it along with normal Windows apps rather than just being restricted to the Windows store.
Windows 8 works quite well on a touch enabled tablet along with a Bluetooth keyboard, I use it on my travels with work as I don’t want to lug around the combined weight of my works laptop and personal laptop, so a tablet with a tiny matching slim keyboard is a huge weight and space saving.