Are you having trouble connecting your Surface to your iPhone’s hotspot? Well it does connect. But you need to make some changes to your iPhone. By default, your iPhone names your phone your_name’s phone. So my iPhone is called Vaibhav’s iPhone. That apostrophe is what throws the spanner in the works for the Surface. So, it is a simple fix.
Go to your iPhone’s Settings, General, About, and Name. Change your phone’s name so that it doesn’t have any special characters in it (I didn’t test whether it works with a space in the name). Save, and bam, it now works.
Why Microsoft doesn’t support it? No idea. Based on what I understand the standard for naming Wifi SSID allows an apostrophe in the name.