Yep fair enough, Windows is a lot nicer to deal with but it just doesn't seem to have the same developer support. My alternative buy is definitely a Macbook but I do think the surface would be better for other student use cases - that said plenty of people on campus have Macbooks so it's not exactly a painful choice.

VMs are a good point and probably pretty much equalise things technically but OSX seems the better main OS for just doing work that happens to be programming/using developer tools etc.