Everybody's navigating a tricky question: what made the iPad such a smash-hit?
(a) Is it a simple case of Apple making a "good enough" product at the right time, selling it at the right price, and then having the market all to itself for an entire year?
or
(b) Is the iPad the residue of a subtle, profoundly canny, and mostly impossible to duplicate comprehension of slate computers and the ways that the Humans respond to them?
I'm guessing that (a) is more true than Apple would be comfortable to admit. I'm even more confident that that overall, the tech industry will be clueless enough about (b) that Apple will hold on to its lead for a considerable time ... assuming that they ever relinquish it.
I'm a slave to my readers, though, and I want them to have a wide gene pool of terrific hardware to select from. So I'm willing to explain to ASUS, Motorola, HP, RIM, and every other company how to build a slate that can answer the question "But why would I buy this instead of an iPad?"