Everyone seems to be missing a huge market for these: Schools.
I can see it improving the collaborative learning experience. But in my opinion, this makes remote teaching in first world schools a viable possibility.
MS's previous enterprise offering in this space was the SMART Room System for Lync. It worked really well...as long as your collaborators were also on Lync. No standards based video conference connectivity, and good luck if you tried to use the system for an external collaboration/training/demo (pick your flavor of WebEx, Google Hangouts, etc.). With Lync being absorbed into Skype for Business I hope they will approach these new offerings with less of a silo type mentality. The tight integration with a Surface looks great, but what happens when someone brings in an iPad?
I don't know about the newer smart boards but the old ones sucked hard. This windows surface device seems like it will be using an actual digitizer and it wont be using a projector.
My highschool had SmartBoards in every classroom. There were only a handful of teachers who knew how to use them. The rest just used it as a projector screen. Rest assured that the same will be said for the Surface Hub; good teachers will use it appropriately, bad teachers will just put slides up on it.
I can see it improving the collaborative learning experience. But in my opinion, this makes remote teaching in first world schools a viable possibility.