The tactics worked as business and tech media spent the weekend and much of Monday engaged in speculation on what Microsoft would be announcing and the term "MSMajorAnnouncement" entered Twitter's global list of trending topics an hour before the announcement.

Microsoft has had mixed success marketing its own hardware. While devices like the Zune music player and Kin smartphone received similar high-profile launches and were ultimately discontinued, the company has had considerable success with the Xbox gaming platform.

The global tablet market, which includes devices such as the iPad, Amazon Fire and Barnes & Noble Nook, is expected to roughly double this year to 119 million units, according to an estimate from Gartner. Next year will see a further 63 million units shipped to take the worldwide market to $182 million, Gartner said.

Announcement of the device comes 12 years after Microsoft first started pushing the concept of tablet computing. Then-chairman Bill Gates showed off a prototype tablet PC at the Comdex 2000 trade show but it wasn't until Apple launched the iPad in 2010 that the market began to take off.