[sestomosi]

When does a phone stop being a phone and lose it's identity?

Do you consider that good or bad?

The iPad definitely has an appeal. It does all of the thing a low cost laptop does and it plays casual games. And although I'm not an expert on it, it is approaching the concept of the "toaster" computer. The appliance that you don't really need to know anything geeky to operate. The only critique I've heard about it is that it does not run Java, instead it runs HTML5. This could be limiting on some web sites today. Who knows about tomorrow.

The reason I won't buy one is because I carry a MacBookPro with me on trips and that does everything I want including playing AAA games via Windows on Bootcamp. Due to Windows/Apple development history, all games are optimized for Windows and a small percentage of them are ported to the Mac. And the Mac ports tend to be crappy with other issues.

When Apple allowed Windows to boot on it's hardware, it made huge advances in market share so maybe game developers in the future might spend more time creating native Mac games, and I don't mean Cider (technical term).

I will never own an apple product just because of iTunes.

That sounds like a personal problem . Most of my music I buy on CD and move it to iTunes. No problem. Really though DRM is the wave of here and now and will only get worse as time goes by. This is why I try to avoid Steam, a Valve online gaming server, when I can.