Removing the abstraction of a pointing device and interacting directly with the GUI is a big deal. If you watch most people use a computer they spend the vast majority of their time tracking a pointing device and occasionally typing some text. Laptops are designed around the idea that most users are going to spend the vast majority of their time entering text and occasionally using a pointing device to track on-screen. Of course for some people this is perfectly appropriate because they do spend the vast majority of their time entering text.

So just make more touchscreen laptops.

A tablet is just irritating because it cant stand up on its own.

I've got a touchscreen laptop. It lets my 3-year old muck around with Tux Paint and educational Flash games but it's not much more useful than that. You'd really need both a transformable hardware setup, and two entirely different UI paradigms for it to make sense. And it would still be hard to compete with a netbook plus a tablet for most folks.

A lot of people were not seeing that, which is probably why Apple was able to launch a 10" $500 tablet without any competitors in the market.

It's still a rich persons toy though, or bought as an additional computer rather than to replace something else.

I don't see it going mainstream, or replacing laptops.

How much input do you actually do on these websites? Facebook, for a major example, is just a sentence or two for each status update, and a word or two for the chat messages.

a laptop isn't the way it is just to house a keyboard. It's that way so you can sit it on your lap with the screen positioned to view it.

I'm not gonna hold a tablet in my hands while I try and use it.

(I spend the vast majority of my time sat on a sofa with a laptop).

Funny, I spend the majority of my time on the couch using an iPad (and happily tapping away on my lap, if I have to use the keyboard, which I usually don't).

That sounds like a really bad position for your neck - staring down at your lap.

What's your source for that statistic? Or did you just make it up?

96% of statistics are made up.

Actually, that's 93%.