I get what you are trying to say - believe me, I do. I just don't think that at $300 this is a good value. This may be Android tablet or a non-Android Kindle - $300 is not something ( I think ) people will pay for a limited thing that looks like all the other tablets but doesn't quite work like it. At $179 may be you have a point. But as you approach the Archos to iPad price range you can't just sell experience to people - you have to sell experience and all the regular stuff competition ships, you know like an email client! There is no excuse for omitting a great email client at that price range.

You seriously think Apple would have sold as many iPads if they sold it with iOS 1.x version of the browser and no email client, purely based on experience? I don't think so.

So again - our debate here is about price, features and experience. You can change the order but I think excluding any one or more thing at $300 is not really a good thing.

And you and me can argue to no end that it's not Android or it doesn't really matter that it's Android - but Amazon has an "Android" App Store and they sell apps through that and people are going to be expecting to see some apps that they won't either due to them not being compatible or not on the Amazon app store or in the best case just not working good enough due to running on an older OS with deep 3rd party customizations.

And upgrades being nearly free for Amazon - It's Google's code, they just have to rebase and deal with kernel/hardware bits just like every other vendor. The customizations probably are all Java and easily mergeable atop newer AOSP releases - if they aren't then that's bad news already. But let me be clear that even if it wasn't nearly free - as a user I don't really care - I want a reasonably secure and updated OS with no artificial limitations if I am paying $300.

To be fair, you're not the target market for this device.