Okay, this is my take. There was a problem, and it was fixed in February. It is not clear why the fix was not for EVERY machine, and it's odd that if there are random quality control issues, why would it cause this one symptom....not waking up, along with
heating up. But, it seems most machines are working reasonably well now. And hibernate seems to help most others.
Do you have an SP4 that sleeps and wakes correctly every time with no changes to the default power settings?
I bought mine in late November, and soon found that it didn't wake from sleep. I read about it, and quickly moved to using hibernate. That took care of the sleep problem, but as others noted, I didn't like using it either. I also noticed that it would
get hot if it went to sleep, but not in hibernate. And I was as angry as everyone else on the Board. And my Microsoft store is 100 miles away, so that made it less desirable to return it right away. I put up with hibernate. Nonetheless, for the past month
or so, I went back to using sleep. It seems to work fine. Once in a while, I have to wake it using Ctrl-alt-delete, which brings up my PIN screen, no lost data.
I am not convinced it is always sleeping, as it is a bit warm sometimes, but not hot, no excessive fan use. I don't like the way it acts going from Dock, to undock, to dock again in that fonts sometimes screw up on the external monitor requiring restarts.
A friend just bought one a few weeks ago, and it acts similar to mine. He never had any significant problems with it.
Microsoft has made a ton of money on Surface. Many have reported that Feb 17 fixed theirs too. I think for the most part, this board represents the group who it has not worked for. But I think even if that is 1%, it is a large number, but not to Microsoft.
However given that clearly they can work better, if you can't get it to work as I've mentioned above, TAKE IT BACK and get another. And make them prove to you in the store that sleep will work. Set it up there, go shopping, go to lunch, come back and make
sure it wakes up. I think doing it by mail order is not a great idea, as you will waste more time if the replacement is also a flawed machine. I also trust no company not to give you "refurbished" versions, and not tell you. Get a new one out of the box.