I use my ipad for a combination of entertainment and work; were I store all my documents for when I travel for work and still able to communicate with the office via email or Skype. I also have music and games installed on it as well, and travel programs so I can locate transportation or use the city's local transportation in various countries. If I'm going on vacation, it pretty much replaces my laptop for basic usage.

You can buy gift cards for programs in it creates a credit on your account and you just use another card when you run out of credit. If you sell your ipad, you can wipe it.. if you install the findmyiphone program you can also remotely wipe it if you get it lost/stolen.

My job has a pilot program for switching over to surface pros for traveling, but I'll probably keep the laptop because the surface simply doesn't have the breadth of programs IOS has, so I would end up bringing my ipad anyway. Besides my work laptop as a Nvidia card in it so I can do material settings while I'm out of town, so I don't want to give that away ;) My job provides interactive services to tvs and mobile devices (including mobile streaming via SM video servers) and support IOS and Android, but not Microsoft because of their poor platform support. The things we can do with the other mobile devices, but just isn't there with Microsoft, though you'd think they would have gotten it together by now. 

 

Also if you get a surface, you will need to buy a size double what you need since MS takes about half the memory for itself; so a 32GB device would only have 16GB available, 64GB has around 32GB, etc. Hopefully Windows 10 handles memory much better. There's not any Poser-type apps for ipads since it's purpose is a mobile device and built for longer battery life. You could run 3d apps on a surface, but you probably would strain your eyes trying to looking at a small screen.