But my point - which apparently no one understands here - is that the products were always conceived originally, from the top, as part of a strategy that included a stack of support services and interactions with a user community.
I'm not seeing that on offer here.
Of course WATCH does apps. That was always a given. But the App Store is saturated, and once devs have produced the obligatory new watch faces, fitness, dating and friend-finding apps, my guess is that the opportunities for doing something compelling, original and gotta-have-that are smaller than they were with the original iPhone.
There will be an exception, or maybe four or five. There will not be thousands of potential gotta-have-that apps to match those that are available in the iPhone/iPad app store.
Apple has always been one of the few tech companies that understands that you don't sell hardware, or software - you sell a complete package of unique and exclusive benefits that happens to run on a hardware device.
That worked for the original Mac, then the OS X Mac, then the iPod, then the iPhone, then the iPad. All had obvious user benefits that were so intuitively compelling they barely needed explanation, and which were enhanced and supported over time with software services that made the package even stronger.
I'd be interested to know what the downvoters on this thread believe is the equivalent user benefit and software support package for WATCH.
I don't believe 'It does apps too and there's even an API, so therefore there's an ecosystem' is the most insightful answer to that question, or that it's what users are looking for to persuade them this is a must-have device.
It's gonna take some time to figure out the killer apps for this computing paradigm. There's nothing at all wrong with the Pebble, it's just that the apps to make it worthwhile don't really exist yet. Apple has enough dirty money to get other people to do the heavy lifting in that arena.
Probably existing developers (knowing objective-C, libraries, OS; swift too) will end up being the most important resource...
But I think you're right that it's simply not a general-purpose device, like apple2e, mac, iphone or ipad. It's too limited. It's more like an ipod, appleTV, game console or kindle.
BTW: I hate the way apple fanboys downvote any comment that can in any way be interpreted as remotely critical of Apple or Apple products. It's more interesting to have a discussion. As it is, your first comment is so down-grayed, I can't actually read it.
It's the same issue really with EMV cards in the US, no one will install readers until there are cards, no one will issue cards until there are readers.
At the core of it, the physical card standard is 'good enough' for most people.
Apple may have the market clout to drive adoption in the US. They have experience in getting partners together, to make new technology actually work. Yes, it may take time, and they may go niche by niche.
Additionally, the iPod launched when the iTunes Store was in its nascency. In fact, iTunes wasn't released for Windows until a few years afterwards. It wasn't possible to load apps (small games) on the iPod until the release of the iPod video.
With the promise of an API at launch, there is more of an ecosystem in place than existed for the previous products you mentioned.