The hype leading up to the announcement was unbelievable, yesterday I saw something like 3 webcomics pre-emptively parodying today's announcement.. there's been a lot of, "it's a tablet PC, oh God it will be horrible". Remember that they've been around for about 15 years, but their market share has been less than 1% of the mobile device market - basically because they've sucked. But remember how crappy the PDA was before the iPhone brought life to that form-factor - it became the smart-phone, and now you probably have an original or a clone. There are already hints of copycats of apples tablet idea forthcoming, with HP and Sony announcing tablet prototypes in time with apple's announcement. At the very least it should make e-readers a lot more useful. Basically it would be nice to have a computer that's as unobtrusive and intuitive as a paper and pen notebook, with serious multimedia capabilities - a design goal which has been pretty much at a dead stop for a while. Apple's just helping push forward that design by appealing to trendy hipsters. Oh you know you'll want (to break) one after something like half of your friends have blown cash on them. But what's more important is that it's a step forwards in the design space - apple's backing on this form-factor will provide a huge incentive for others to innovate in an area that's been stagnant for about a good 8 years. And if it really is a huge failure.. well, who would cry if apple produced a failure? ... Jackasses. Everyone else would be tickled.