Don't hate the player, hate the game. If apple can price a product at 500-800 dollars and make money, then there's no reason other manufacturer's can't do the same. I'm tired of hearing the whining from these other companies, it just makes them look weak. If you can't compete you shouldn't be playing the game, period. These companies really need to grow some balls, start being more aggressive, and maybe come up with ideas of their own.
If it's one thing I appreciate about apple, it's that in spite of all their restrictions and their closed ecosystem, they're innovators. Even if they don't come up with the original idea for something (there were MP3 players before the ipod), they realize the potential of them. They're trend setters, and because they are so aggressive in bringing compelling, full featured products to market, other companies end up chasing the products apple created, when they SHOULD be thinking up the next best thing. If they keep trying to chase apple, they're going to have to keep playing by their rules, that's it. These corporations need to stop becoming so enamored with the markets and products that apple creates and trying to steal a piece of that pie and start making a better pie of their own.
Don't get me wrong here, I appreciate the other tablets and products out there, and really hope android takes off in the tablet market because Honeycomb has potential and it does put pressure on Apple. But if these companies really want to get out of Apple's shadow they need to identify the needs of consumers and come up with REVOLUTIONARY solutions to meet those needs, they need to introduce new and better ways of doing things, new paradigms, NOT rehashed or different variations of a product that's already out there.
Anyways, sorry for the long, rant-ish, post I'm just kind of appalled by a corporation whining that another company is offering cheap products that make it hard to compete. Welcome to capitalism!
If Google and Htc/Motorola/Samsung really wanted to kill the iPad they'd release a tablet running honeycomb at $350 or less. Apple could never compete. They might have to take a hit on costs, but they'd eventually overtake the iPad through attrition. Google would also have to work on increasing the quality of it's marketplace.
The thing is though, Google really doesn't care about android as an OS, it's just a means to justify an end, that end being to proliferate the Google search engine, the more devices that run android, the more devices that run google search by default, and google doesn't have to pay other OS companies.