This is DOA. $999 for 4 GB of RAM in 2017? You got to be kidding me. Proprietary connector and no USB-C in 2017? Did you hire Apples marketing team or WTF?
The screen is good (3:2) but else it's just an overpriced hipster book and those people usually buy Apple. For sure prefer something with a crappy 16:9 screen but USB-C over this like HP spectre /elitebook x360.
It's the exact same price range as the Surface Pro 4 products, except it essentially has a free keyboard since you had to pay an extra $150 for the surface keyboard. i5 surface 4 Pro 4GB 128GB SSD $999 release price. With the Surface Pro 4, you can pay an extra $299 for the keyboard & 1 year of office 365 (and a sleeve). The Surface Laptop comes with the keyboard and year of office free out the gate, so you could say it's $300 cheaper, with better battery life as an extra bonus.
No, it's not going to compete with the cheap Lenovo, Dell, or Acer laptops. You can certainly get one of those with superior performance for about half the cost. The difference is none of those will touch the battery life of the Surface Laptop, nor will they have as good of a screen, and they will weight around twice as much at a minimum.
If you buy a Surface Laptop, you are paying a premium for extremely good battery life, an excellent touch-enabled screen, and presumably rock solid build and support. If you don't care about such things, there are better options. If those things are your number one priority, you will be hard pressed to find another laptop superior in all three metrics for the same price range.