Arrington said there was a market for tablets that people use on the couch. There is. It's filled by the iPhone/iTouch, a pocketable device that works as well on the couch as it does anywhere else.

A too-weak-for-fullscreen-video 12″ tablet with 5 hours of battery time and no keyboard was never a good idea unless it was going to be $200. It's too big to be usable everywhere, too feature poor to compete with even Android phones, too weak to be a portable Internet TV.

Arrington, for all the shit he talks about netbooks and specifically Asus' Eee, saw that Asus steamed up its hype train with promises of a $100-$200 laptop, delivered a $300 netbook, and saw it sell by the dozens.

Arrington wanted a piece of that, read all the frothing Apple fanboys beg for an iTablet, decided that was his niche, started shit-talking netbooks and iPhones while announcing this at $200, then rode the hype to $300… and didn't have the acumen to hold on to the bull when it started to buck.

Asus could do it because they're a corporation that's done this before. Same with Apple. Arrington, believing that bloggers are as good at anything they blog about because they read so much about it, decided he could throw some people together and crank this out in a year or so. How hard could it be? He had nearly singlehandedly knocked over and built up startups with ideas he'd publicly deride.

Never had he looked past his own nose to see the web of designers, producers, distributors, and wave upon wave of lawyers beneath a startup. Now he knows, and since he lacks a scrap of grace, he'll kick and scream like an infant until he's out of breath.

Considering how Arrington's a professional blowhard – dare I say, the biggest and loudest in the industry – that'll be a long, long time.

First such device also with a phone and 20 hour battery life will win. Only Pixel Qi can provide the tech to get there.

The tablet does have one ergonomic advantage over a netbook: you don't have to “open” it to immediately use it, and it is less unwieldy than a netbook. Lack of physical KB is a problem for text-entry intensive uses, but for content-consumption uses (web browsing, music listening, video watching) it's not a big issue.

Personally, I'd pay for a tablet that I can use as a remote access terminal to all of my computers, as a news & book reader, and as a music/video/net radio player. And all with day-long battery. I can skip the video playing portion if that takes too much power, for all-day battery life. I don't need to do any actual computing on it.