Agreed, but seeing as I don't own any Apple stock, this is immaterial to me. I am more interested in getting devices based on modern process technology if I am paying top dollar for them. The iPad 3 will do alright versus its competitors for a few months, but once Android/Win8 tablets start adopting 28nm SoCs and 4G radios, Apple's software advantage will evaporate. This is the Achilles' heel of their once-a-year release cycles. Of course, next year it's likely that everyone will be stuck at 28nm, and Apple will be back on top (hence why I'm waiting for the "iPad 4").
If Apple waited 2-3 more months before releasing the new iPad, chances are Samsung's 32nm low voltage node would've panned out fine (if Samsung was willing to allow Apple access to it, which is an unanswered question). Sure, there might have been shortages for awhile due to less-than-ideal yields, but I also saw a pile of unsold iPads at the Apple Store today when I returned mine...
The CPU in the A5X is completely unchanged from last year. This is pretty surprising in the context of other rapidly-evolving mobile devices, and I suspect you'll see Apple's competitors jumping to take advantage of it in short order. Apple made a bet that the retina display will be enough to differentiate the iPad from other tablets into 2013.
As far as anyone knows, Apple is using stock ARM CPU cores and PowerVR GPU cores -- the same as pretty much everyone else in the industry. There's probably a bit of additional engineering going into the Ax chips (power gating?), but not nearly as much as was originally required to design the CPU/GPU components.
See post #25.
