The interface, mainly. Windows (or OSX, for that matter) based tablets have tried have failed for years. The iPhone/iPad OS is built from the ground up to be tablet/finger friendly. Remember, the iPad is NOT a laptop/netbook replacement in the traditional sense. The phrase 'media device' keeps popping up in my head.

Could you elaborate on Windows 7 finger-friendliness? What kind of a media-device does not accept memory cards or doesn't have a camera or a USB slot?

Never said Windows 7 was finger-friendly, and I don't think I'm qualified to comment on it, but imo, the win7 is simply geared to replace the mouse actions with a finger, and that's not helpful at all.

And from where I'm looking, portable physical media storage is fast becoming non-essential(obsolete?) with respect to devices that are used for consumption of music, the web, books, etc; ie- CONSUMER devices. eg- laptops, ebook readers, mp3 players, etc.

I'm a tech-savvy person, and I've had a broken dvd-drive on my laptop for about 7 months now. I've never found a reason to fix it; I'm as surprised by that as anybody else, I suppose. I play movie dvds on my console, and the eye-fi card on the camera is handy as hell.

In future, could you link the alternative product in question? I understand that it sounds incredibly lazy but I tend to scan many threads at a time and going on a google-hunt for something you wish to discuss makes my panda cry.

Not to mention that finding obscure taiwanese/chinese products can actually be mildly non-trivial at times.

I would never consider Asus EEE obscure, are they not popular in the US? I remember seeing them a lot while traveling and weren't they the ones who started the whole netbook craze? They are the first thing that comes to mind when someone mentions a netbook.

>I would never consider Asus EEE obscure

I'd never heard of a multi-touch model before.

This is utterly beside the point. I just want the title of the post to link to the subject under discussion.

I don't want meta-discussion hand-wringing.

Just a link. This is YCNews, not the US Senate.

all the iPhone apps, not to mention the ones that will be built for the bigger screen and more capable hardware.

All the iPhone apps in a closed enviroment compared to all the Windows apps?

perokreco, you asked a question, and anothermike answered it. No need to be snarky and go on a tangent.