Danny Sullivan:
That’s not a journalist holding Surface. It’s one of the Microsoft guys. They’d swing them around with a pretty picture on the front, I guess so we’d go “ooh” and “ahh.” If we were lucky, we were allowed to hold one for a few seconds. But if you tried to do anything with it, bang, it was gone.
Here's what happened when he finally did get a chance to hold one:
After asking repeatedly if I could hold one — I felt like a seven-year-old, “please can I hold it, please can I try, would you mind if I try” — one of the Microsoft guys gave me a shot. I brought up the Start screen by hitting the Windows button on the front of the tablet, hit Desktop to get to the Windows 8 desktop, did a long press guessing that would bring up the Screen Resolution setting and it did — at which point, the unit was literally jerked out of my hands.