MS Surface impact on learning...

Lately I have been hearing from many of the visitors to our exhibit and who sit down at the Surface table and look through the documents, that they are more interested in the material on Surface that the same document that are behind glass and on display. Why I ask? Mostly what I hear is that they can "touch" it. Obviously we are all tactile creatures that take more interest in those things with which we can interact. I think it also has to do with the senses. As I and my wife teach our children we have learned that the more senses you can engage while teaching the more they retain. Microsoft Surface seems to first grab the users interest because of it's re-creation of reality with it's multi-touch and physics modeling; in other words it's "cool" aspect. Then the user starts to engage with, in our case the rare material, the material and start a more scholarly experience. I tell the story of hearing from a student who was leaving the exhibit say that he had just read the entire Declaration of Idependence for the first time while sitting at the Microsoft Surface. What was the thing that made him read it now? Certainly he could have read it in many reprintings in various books. What was it about Surface that kept is attention long enough to read the original printing of the document?