Last night Lenovo unveiled the first competitor to Microsoft’s Surface tablets, the ThinkPad Tablet 2. PCMag had two occasions to spend time with the new tablet, once with a pre-production device (heavily under wraps) and last night at the official announcement of the tablet at Lenovo’s 20th anniversary celebration.

With Windows 8 Pro and an array of features for home and office, the ThinkPad Tablet 2 promises to bring the portability and intuitive interface of a tablet to enterprise environments and everyday life. The ThinkPad Tablet 2 will support older desktop apps, is equipped with numerous security features, and has several accessories that bring laptop and desktop-style functionality to the device. The ThinkPad Tablet 2 will be outfitted with an Intel Atom processor, 2GB of RAM, a 64GB solid-state drive (SSD) and a 10.1-inch display with 1,366-by-768 resolution and touch support for fingers and stylus. Front- and rear-facing cameras can be used for Skype and taking photos, and integrated storage means you’ll never have to remember where you set your stylus.

There are a few remaining questions, however. For starters, what will the new tablet cost? ThinkPad laptops run the gamut from affordable to premium, but in the tablet space few (aside from Apple) have seen great success with premium pricing, and products like Amazon’s Kindle Fire are priced so low that Amazon is likely taking a loss on the hardware. We also don’t have specifics regarding price for Microsoft’s line of Surface devices, and buyers deciding between the two will certainly be pushed one way or another by price differences.

What sort of performance should we expect from the ThinkPad Tablet 2? Lenovo refers to an “upcoming Intel Atom” processor with Intel x86 architecture, which suggests an as-yet-unannounced Intel CPU will be at the heart of the tablet. In tablets running Windows 7, however, we’ve seen Atom-powered systems fall short of what we expect from a Windows device. Lenovo says that this tablet has been developed in partnership with Intel, so it’s likely that the unannounced hardware offers a bump up in processing power. But until specifics are known it’s a big question mark. Whether or not the new operating system and hardware make a winning combination is yet to be seen.

For more on what to expect from the ThinkPad Tablet 2, hit the slideshow.