Try writing a 100,000 words novel and crunching those huge product and financial Excel sheets on the iPad and its touch "keyboard". When you can honestly tell me that you've enjoyed this experience, I know that something must be wrong with you.
I'm just going to assume you misread where I was writing/responding about the Mac there...not the iPad
The iPad is a pure viewing and consuming device. It was not designed for creation or (text) input.
I assume that you must be speaking about iPad 1.0 and it's OS, and not any future incarnations Apple may have in mind. Once a critical mass of the public has grown free of a hardware QWERTY keyboard for text input, they are going to be ready to adapt to other devices, such as a single-hand chording input unit the size of a tennis ball. "Oh the places you'll go..."
I also doubt that a device that is coupled to a restricted and censored AppStore is going to be more than an initial niche success.
Google's Android platform might not be as shiny as the iPad's iPhone OS yet, but it is Open Source and has a completely unrestricted market place. Furthermore, everyone can build his own hardware around it.
I'm going to have to assume you don't own an android phone or you'd have some appreciation for the iTunes store and Apple's controlled environment. Furthermore, it seems that Microsoft is looking to give its Sys 7 phones a similar experience as Apple.
When everyone builds their own hardware around an OS, then you have buyer's chaos trying to find apps that their implementation of android hardware will be able to use. Furthermore, the wide open creation of software means you have problems with programs hogging resources and crashing the device... as android is now experiencing.
The "unrestricted marketplace" was a fine idea in the '80s when most of the computer world was made up of techno junkies on the outside and a highly restricted MIS-managed corporate environment of users on the inside. The mass of today's buyers and users don't want to futz with their hardware and software, they want it to "just work."
That mix of a consolidated software platform and unlimited hardware variations is what made the PC so successful -- and at the same time the total vendor lock-in made the Mac the niche platform that it still is today.
I disagree. The PC became successful, and surpassed the Apple II in sales in the early '80s because the PC was initially sold by and controlled by the IBM Corp. There was a buyer's expectation of a level of safety within the corporate world about "buying IBM" and having that decision lead to integration of the PC with the rest of the company's computer equipment.
There were two things that led to IBM's loss of control of the market they created, but that's grist for another topic.
History is going to repeat itself here, only that this time the competition is not called Microsoft Windows, but Google Android and Google Chromium OS.
That "history is going to repeat itself here," is a gross assumption. I'm not as certain as you that the iPad/iPhone IU is an evolutionary device of the PC OS. I suspect it represents an "information-handling paradigm shift in the making," and the forces that will drive its adoption and evolution are yet to be fully apparent.
If, as you suggest, that a free-for-all on software development and marketing channels is such a great idea, then the jail-broken iPhone should surpass the Apple/iTunes model any day now.
And eventually, the open platform is always going to win. And that's something that Steve Jobs still doesn't get. In a few years from now, he'll do the same whining again how everybody in the industry stole "his" ideas. And as we all know, Apple had stolen most of its ah-so innovative ideas from others (e.g. GUI, Mouse, touch screens, now even the whole iPad concept), they were just great at catching all the hype.
This part of your post is just "noise" and need not be commented on.
