I used an Asus Transformer Prime as my laptop for some time, and in some ways the experience described here sounds like it's actually gotten worse on an interface level since 4.0.
For the most part though, I found it reasonably decent for just a "monkeying around on the internet" desktop, but when I needed to actually do work, it quickly became useless. Google Docs on Android is a fucking travesty of a thing, and MS Office was not yet available at the time.
We reached peak Tablet usability somewhere around 4.3/4.4. At this point Android actually seemed to use some of that landscape screen space to do things like have the quick-settings menu drop down on the right-hand side of the screen, and have the notifications bar drop down from the left-hand side.
Then Google decided to merge the two, and since then it's been back to the "tablet is giant phone" interface.
I too have a Transformer Prime TF201 and find it fantastic for browsing. The years have not been kind to it; not only is it stuck on Android 4.2 it has become very slow and the battery in the keyboard half has died.
So I bought an ultra-cheap Windows 7" tablet. While it's much better from an application point of view (you can run Word on it, Visual Studio, and so on) it's really hard to use the traditional desktop without a mouse - everything is too small to be a touch target.
> it's actually gotten worse on an interface level since 4.0.
I have never tried to use Android as a 'laptop OS' (even though the Pixel C is so very tempting) but from what I can gather, the interface has been rethought profoundly for 4.0 and focused on the mobile use case.
According to the rumors, Google is supposed to deliver a more polyvalent version of the OS (and more importantly of its own apps)... Let's see what happens (or not) at Google I/O.
For the most part though, I found it reasonably decent for just a "monkeying around on the internet" desktop, but when I needed to actually do work, it quickly became useless. Google Docs on Android is a fucking travesty of a thing, and MS Office was not yet available at the time.