One of the frustrating features of the PC market is the way major PC OEMs produce dozens of similar-but-different products. It divides the broader market into an astonishing array of categories that tend to overlap and serve to make buying decisions more complicated than we'd like.

So it's no surprise this same attitude and approach is being applied to the tablet market. We've been taking a look at a pair of 8-inch, x86 Atom tablets running Windows 8.1 from Lenovo: the $299-$319 Miix 2 8 (an awkward name if ever there was one) and the $399 ThinkPad 8.