He is directly rebutting one person's opinion, not coming up with a talking point after consulting with a survey of people's reactions to the new announcements. Who's to say it's not the parent that was mistaken?
I know several artists who bought the Surface for exactly this reason and found it disappointing. The hardware in the Surface Pro is pretty mediocre unless you spend a lot of money on it (at which point a Cintiq Companion becomes an intriguing idea if you don't know what Wacom's customer support is like).
Most of those artists ended up buying iPad Pros to replace them with.
Using the Surface as a tablet for drawing has been a huge use-case for visual artists from day 1. Just see this positive review of the original Surface Pro by Gabe from Penny Arcade: https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2013/02/22/the-ms-sur...