The "mian" thing is not an error. It's there to make a point about how the brain interprets code, depending on your familiarity with the language and problem. She explains it not much later on.
I've purchased one two months ago, and it's great. Ubuntu worked out of the box (the only exception being the fingerprint reader), and it runs smoothly. The screen is sharp, and it's super light. I'm happy with mine.
I came from a 15” Macbook Pro, and at first it felt a little smaller, but now I am more than used to it such that I can’t even remember what it was like to code on the 15.
I do spend most of my time on my laptop in bed with my knees up though, so the laptop is closer to my face.
That being said, I love my XPS 13 with Ubuntu. Battery life is good, everything just works, build quality is high, and the screen is beautiful (I got the 4k one and run it at 200%).
I won’t be going back to apple ever again (and I used them for 13 years). I feel much more at home in linux.
Tim Jenison was interviewed by Leo Laporte on Triangulation (http://twit.tv/show/triangulation/118). They start talking about it between minutes 35 and 36, and he describes the process in a little more detail, including magnification, distance from the canvas and so forth
I had the opportunity to use it for a few weeks at work, when developing and Android app, and made the jump from the iPhone to a Nexus 4. Google Now is incredible. Last week I went to another city for a family funeral and the next day it was showing traffic to the place I slept, sights to see, etc. This weekend I was walking around town and a card showed up with movie times. It's little things that wow you and actually turn out to be useful.
The Android experience is very good now, but I would be lying if I said that app quality is nearly as high, especially in things like photography and audio. That still makes me think about whether my commitment is long-term.
I guess it's due to the extra work they have to do to put the proper amount of color on the sensor, as the Red EPIC they used tends to mute them a little bit.
I love the energy itself that people are putting into making the web more of an app development platform. It's commendable how strongly and energetically they push to get there, building cool demos and frameworks that on a relative scale (i.e. from the web of ten years ago to the web of today) seem magical. But, frankly, more and more I feel like you, and more and more all that effort seems wasted on bringing everything up to par with old desktop patterns and techniques when we could all instead push everything somewhere new.
Like you I write web apps, but I'm old enough/lucky enough to have had some other experiences, and to be quite honest I find even Gtk+ is more pleasant overall than the MV* framework of the month. That we have folks now trying to write AutoCAD or Photoshop in JavaScript just like a loss for our industry.
It seems pretty straightforward on the surface, for sure. However, considering just how convoluted phonegap, weinre and friends can get, it's not hard to believe it turned into a mud ball.