Akkam's Razor TL;DR.

I’m just not seeing the win.

Sure, the fanboy who has iEverything will grab one.   I likewise suppose that the person who would buy one of Apple’s other fine products but were deterred by the relative high price may also consider one.   Like others have mentioned, the iPad (horrible name, BTW.   iSlate, iBook, and iTablet would have been much better IMHO) has a series of shortcomings that are inexcusable:

• No Adobe Flash
• No multitasking
• No camera
• No HDMI-out.
• No USB ports
• No expandable memory via memory card

Yes, yes, I know that it gets you the iPhone (or iPod Touch) experience on a larger screen for less money with internet connectivity.   If compared to the Kindle DX, the iPad is a far superior product.   But, for core competencies (book reader), the regular Kindle would be sufficient.   Might you be better off pocketing an 8GB iPod Touch and a regular Kindle for the same price?

I know that Apple products are made of angel-wing feathers and unicorn tears, but the iPad is a tough sell.   I wrote before that there was   fundamentally no difference between Microsoft locking users in with software and Apple doing the same with hardware.   The iPad continues Apple’s plan but now includes both hardware and software.   You can’t easily get content either on or off the iPad.   Content on the iProducts largely flows through the funnel that ends and begins with the app store/iTunes.   Further, the same shortcomings that were on early versions of the iPhone are still present on the iPad, several years later.   Shouldn’t the iPad have a similar feature set to the contemporary iPhone?

I think the omission of Flash is the most telling.   No Hulu.   No Slideshare.   No YouTube.   No Flash games.   No Scribd.   Yes, Flash is annoying in some of its implementations,   but there is no denying that it is THE standard for online multimedia content.   So why omit it?

Adobe certainly gets royalties of some sort from Flash installs – but I suspect it’s from authoring and distribution software, and not device players.   I think what we are looking at is along the lines of Apple refusing to let Google Voice into the app store – it’s not about “confusing the user” with software that apes the products core functionality, it is about maintaining a monopoly on a channel of distribution.   Apple is positioning itself as the savior for legacy media – print and broadcast.   In order to do that, they need to garner exclusivity.   The means video and other rich content through iTunes and not the browser.   In short, a software and hardware granted monopoly.     At the same time, Google sees the tyranny of Apple and will exploit the trojan horse that lives on every internet connected computing device – the browser.   Hence their purchase of Gizmo 5, allowing VOIP calling on the iPhone, completely skipping the app store.   Apple’s only response will be blocking content, which would go ever well.

I will readily admit that I am a Google fanboy, and have a horrible tendency to like the opposite of the crowd, simply for the sake of contrarianism.   I find it hard to believe that the other tablet manufacturers – not just Google – won’t capitalize on Apple’s perceived weaknesses, and won’t do so well before v2 of the iPad comes out.   If Amazon gets out of the hardware business and licenses the Kindle software to the next generation of Microsoft, Android, and Linux mobile platforms,   especially at a superior price point with a richer feature-set, a plus-sized iPhone experience will not be sufficient.