There's a lot to this, for the company, other than employees getting bonuses in hardware instead of cash. They're putting MS products in the hands of tens of thousands of people most invested in evangelizing and evaluating them - every MS software product benefits from dogfooding, why not hardware? It will presumably give MS a chance to debug enterprise bring-your-own-device that they are trying to support by implementing it on an enormous scale themselves. These are developers who may be now inclined to write apps. And most MS employees don't have laptops, so now they won't be stuck with pen and paper in meetings.