HP’s tablet dilemma: how to be runner-up.

Andrew Orlowski has an interesting piece in The Register about HP’s new tablet. It opens with this striking para.

After just one year, the iPad is making more revenue than Apple’s 30-year-old personal computer division. It’s almost bringing in as much as Dell brings in from PCs. This is a huge business, already. And nobody can quite say what their iPad is good for. If ever a computer was a means to an end, then the iPad is it – rather than doing anything uniquely iPad-ish, it takes lots of “ends” a laptop (or Kindle, or smartphone) gets you to, and just gets you there slightly more conveniently. PCs are going to be around a long time; the iPad will be right there alongside them.