Never has a review unit turned heads quite like the Surface Studio, Microsoft's gigantic touch screen PC. In the few minutes it took to set up on my desk, a small crowd had formed, asking what it was, and whether they could touch it.

The Surface Studio is part computer, part artist's easel, part drafting table. The whopping 71cm "PixelSense Display" is so beautiful, so crisp, so wonderfully colourful, even the most pointless activity is fun. So, for the first few days using it, I just had pointless fun. I spent time spinning around maps, playing games, or colouring in comic book images. It reminded me of the hours I wasted playing with the original iPad – and, like playing with the iPad back in 2010, the Surface Studio feels familiar, but also completely new.

Tilting the screen from regular desktop viewing angle to drawing surface is equally fun. The hinge requires almost no pressure to adjust, yet it somehow stays stable until you deliberately move it again.

After a few more days of simply playing with my big old desktop iPad, it became clear I needed to bring some experts in and crowdsource this report. Abusing my position at the University of NSW, I organised hands-on demonstrations with power users from the faculties of Arts, Engineering, and the Built Environment. I wanted to know if the Surface Studio could handle intensive tasks from Adobe's Creative Cloud through to AutoDesk's applications – and whether the Surface Pen and Dial added anything to the experience.

The results were mixed. While the Studio's processor had no trouble keeping up with AutoDesk's computer animation software, Maya and 3ds Max, the performance did not justify Microsoft's price, which starts at $4699 for the base model, up to $6599 for the high end. For that price, most animators would prefer an ugly but powerful Xeon workstation, and space for a high-end graphics card.

Don't let that big screen fool you, Microsoft have jammed all of the computing power into the base of the unit, meaning the Studio is built on laptop parts, not high-end components.

Adobe's Creative Cloud applications fared a little better. Photoshop and Illustrator already support the Surface Pen's precision drawing, making the price a little easier to swallow. In art studios, the Studio could replace a computer as well as a Wacom tablet. But Lightroom lagged under the weight of large libraries, thanks to slow write speeds of the discs. The Surface Studio uses a combination of SSD and spinning hard drives to bring a balance of speed and storage, and has no option for an all SSD configuration.

Most disappointing was the lack of support for the Studio's unique input method, the Dial. The Dial is a small disc that can be used on a desk like a large volume knob, but when used against the glass of the Studio it becomes an interactive part of the screen, pulling up contextual menus or manipulating the images around it.

While some small, independent apps have fantastic support for it, turning it into a jog wheel, a colour picker, or an awesome spiralling menu, apps from market leaders have yet to embrace this new input method.

Still, all who came to play with the Studio were impressed by the sheer size and resolution of the screen, and its ability to handle four or five full-sized open application windows at the same time. And while we all agreed we didn't need one, we all desperately wanted to keep it.

The Surface Studio is a quintessential 'first generation' product. It's dazzlingly expensive: if you can afford it, you're paying for the research and development that made its manufacturing possible. But until its performance matches its price, I suspect it will be more of an executive status symbol than an artist's or architect's tool.