Apple manged to turn a multi-user OS into a tablet OS, why can't Microsoft do it? The actual NT kernel is supposedly hardware-agnostic.
I am guessing that power management was simply not on the radar when NT was developed. Few people had laptops, and if they did, nobody expected more than an hour or two of battery life out of them, and nobody really cared too much about power consumption on desktops and servers.
For whatever reason they have not made power management a priority since then, maybe because it was easy (and at least somewhat correct) to blame 3rd party drivers. But in the Surface devices they have the same "known target" that Apple has always had with their hardware, so they should have been able to optimize for that, if they had wanted to.
Microsoft is more dedicated to backwards compatibility, way more dedicated. Apple mostly don't care about breaking something that's three years old if it means they can do some new thing. It's a tradeoff and they've both made their choices. Can't blame MS, their choice has served them well for a long time.
I am guessing that power management was simply not on the radar when NT was developed. Few people had laptops, and if they did, nobody expected more than an hour or two of battery life out of them, and nobody really cared too much about power consumption on desktops and servers.
For whatever reason they have not made power management a priority since then, maybe because it was easy (and at least somewhat correct) to blame 3rd party drivers. But in the Surface devices they have the same "known target" that Apple has always had with their hardware, so they should have been able to optimize for that, if they had wanted to.