It has largely the same SoC and GPU as the just-released-to-great-acclaim international Galaxy S4 (running at a slightly slower clockspeed in the Nexus 7 2013).

It has largely the same SoC and GPU as the just-released-to-great-acclaim international Galaxy S4 (running at a slightly slower clockspeed in the Nexus 7 2013). As to the RAM being "paltry", compared to what? A desktop? There is no non-Intel tablet that I know of with more RAM. And of course it's shared memory, as it is on every comparable device -- again, are you comparing this with Haswell laptops or something? The Nexus tablet is a very inexpensive device (as is the Nexus 4, for that matter). It is not intended to push any boundaries, but is to bring the advantages that other, much more expensive products brought to market to the low-end. Apparently great screen, very decent SoC, dual cameras...$229. Yeah, it's a pretty good entrant. I've been quite disappointed in my Nexus 7s as well, though half of that I attribute to nvidia -- they are the kings of overpromising and underdelivering. It also has suffered the well known flash degradation, and hopefully Asus/Google have learned something from that debacle.