Yea, every option on the iPad (except for the new super expensive iPad Pro with the $100 pencil add-on) is hacky. Basically, without getting too nerdy, touchscreens receive input through a digitizer. Your normal touchscreen is a capacitive digitizer, and it recognizes your fingers. Your Surface Pro and other machines that use similar technology actually have 2 digitizers, a capacitive digitizer and an active digitizer. The active digitizer is where the magic happens. Based on electromagnetism or other methodologies, when the pen reaches a certain hover distance, the capacitive digitizer is disabled and the active digitizer kicks in. That allows you to rest your palm on the screen, and the active digitizer talks with the pen to interpret tilt, pressure sensitivity, etc.
All the expensive styluses for iPad try to replicate the active digitizer experience using software, bluetooth, etc, but it always ends up being kinda crappy. You have the real deal.
