I have a Surface Pro 1, and installed Ubuntu and Linux Mint pretty easy... but I wouldn't use any Linux in a Surface honestly, the Desktop Environments are far from having decent HDPI support, and the touch experience is still far from feeling usable.
Ubuntu 14 doesn't support a lot of the latest hardware at the moment. I had an Intel i7 NUC and installing ubuntu 14 on it was a nightmare... You fix one thing to move the installer, another thing breaks. It's trial and error. Ubuntu 15 was just straight forward, one click install.
it is a painful install process, but that should change completely with ubuntu 15.10