Apple really does need some serious competition soon, if only so that people will stop writing irritating articles comparing Apple's product line with figments of their imagination.

It would be one thing to read an article saying "the iPad has X amount of RAM, but Tablet Q has Y amount of RAM, and that's probably why Tablet Q is so much better at tasks A and B." But instead we get "the thing that you can buy right now at a store offers X, but it really doesn't hold a candle to the thing I saw on Star Trek last night".

Real engineers ship, people. There are a lot of constraints. You can't wish them away, so you can't compare a real thing with an imaginary one. You can only compare two real things. And you can't part them out, imagining an animal with the vision of an eagle and the reach of a giraffe and the speed of a cheetah and the fecundity of E. coli. That can't happen. Maybe you can design it on paper, and maybe you can build a very scary-looking prototype, but that animal can't be shipped.

The only actual comparison I see here is one sentence about a RAM spec: The Xoom has 1GB, and that's bigger. What this means in real life, however, I do not see here. Yeah, I know the number is bigger, but tell me why I care. Tell me why it's worth every other compromise that I'll have to make, just to get that RAM.