I have the Nexus 7. Bought it while on vacation thinking that if I didn't like it, I would just give it to my toddler. It turns out I love it and take it with me everywhere. The performance is good, and the form factor is perfect for me.

YRMV.

The Nexus 7 certainly seems impressive, I'm not looking to use for full video etc. though.

By garbage, do you mean mainly in terms of things like screen res and low CPU power?

I just found this for instance for £35 http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/321040730821?ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX...

Which I'm sort of tempted by just for email.

It's not just the processing power that matters: battery life is really important to making a tablet useful.

"Up to 6 hours" (as quoted for that Binatone) won't cut it, I don't think, even though the hardware's otherwise well able to handle email and similar. Unless you're really assiduous about plugging it in all the time you're not using it, it'll be dead every time you pick it up!

Cheap tablets probably make excellent status boards, though, left plugged in and running a browser.

The under $100 category has improved a lot in a year. You can get Android 4.1 and Google apps for that price now. Even cheap tablets have capacitive touch now. Screen resolution will still suck at that price.

There is supposed to be a $35 to $50 A-Pad coming from China that runs Android 4.0 on a 7 inch color touch screen. I heard it was supposed to be in the USA before Christmas 2012. But I never saw them for sale anywhere.

I had considered an Android tablet after Apple screwed me over on my iPod Touch 5th generation and locking me out of iOS updates (No 6.0.2 and above locked at 6.0.1) and iOS 6.0.1 causes nothing but app crashes. I am told to just buy a new iOS device to make the app crashes go away. I figure I'd spend my money on an Android to see if it would work better.