Interesting that your chosen alternative was a laptop rather than a netbook. Along those lines, if you think in terms of the evolution of personal computers as

Interesting that your chosen alternative was a laptop rather than a netbook. Along those lines, if you think in terms of the evolution of personal computers as desktop -> laptop -> netbook -> tablet, that last step is a puzzler. If you take the author's 10 reasons and strip out the stuff that's a retread of previous products ("Look, it's portable! And OMG you can watch movies!") it seems to me you're left with one key point: the user interface makes it fun & easy to use. I don't think it's an accident that the only two tablet platforms that look viable so far, Apple and Android, are based on years of usability testing in the smartphone arena. Tablets may be computers inside, but in terms of product design they're consumer entertainment devices.