Last month (finally) a couple of Microsoft Surfaces arrived at our offices. In order to investigate the possibilities we have adapted a number of applications. One of them is NASA WorldWind which now runs on the Microsoft Surface and can be controlled by gestures and object recognition.
You can use a compass to make the globe turn around. Zooming and panning is implemented like in most multi-touch applications: moving a single finger pans the map. Moving two fingers towards each other or away from each other let you zoom in and out. Also the globe can be tilted easily by using three fingers where the third finger controls the angle of the tilt.
The compass is a nice demonstration of the additional possibilities of the Surface as you can see on the movie below.