After seeing the Surface Studio, it's hard to imagine what Apple can produce that will compete on the "wow" factor tomorrow, even if the Studio ends up not quite delivering for its price. It definitely set a bar for what we might expect with an innovative brand. I say this as a long time Apple customer who would actually just be fine if they released a new external monitor. I haven't been able to find a decent non-Apple monitor that doesn't exhibit wonky behavior when connected to my MBP (this includes the small things, such as responding to the Brightness function key)

About that, I have had some luck with https://github.com/kfix/ddcctl to adjust an external monitor brightness and 'brew brightness' to read the current brightness of my MBP.

I set that up in a cron job and that works well enough (although with a delay) with the brightness button of the MBP. The delay is less important to me as I use it essentially to sync the monitor brightness to the MBP autobrigthness.