He's basically stating that the Surface has "version 1.0" issues (in hardware and software) that he hopes will go away with the "1.1"/"2.0" release of Surface..
Yes, but your iPad 3 is still a perfectly good device with few thorny, glaring, obvious omissions.
I think that's the point the statement is trying to make: that even just looking at the device there are enough things that are glaring omissions and misses that you will feel shortchanged when they're inevitably fixed in v2.
I feel the same way about the iPad mini. The lack of a retina display in this day and age feels like a very obvious miss, and you know they will fix this next year, which makes buying it now seem like a poor proposition.
In my opinion, the lack of hardware to match at Retina resolution the rendering capabilities of the iPad 2 was a pretty HUGE miss on the iPad 3. I can't see anything so obviously missing from the Surface.
Read the article, it covers that point. If MS would have wanted to compete on that front it would have either needed to sacrifice graphics performance, or go Apple's route and design a custom SoC. One isn't acceptable and the other probably not feasible given the resources they wanted to invest.
