You can’t really use a mouse and keyboard at the dinner table. I mean you could, but not having a lid or needing to put it on a surface makes tablets much more natural to use.
for creation / creativity: tablets and smart phones are definitely not the way to go
for pure light/medium consumer consumption, tablets or smartphones are wonderful and conveniently portable.
The typical person usually falls into this category the majority of time
none of them truly eliminate or replace each other for they all have their own niche and place, with some minor overlap
Why do people use this argument? You’re EATING, why would you need a tablet during that time? It even gets really disgusting after a while if you use it with fatty fingers. You might even spill something on it. So many people seem to want one just for this. I don’t get it.
Good thing I don’t have fatty fingers.
I usually always eat dinner with family, so there are lots of times when I’m having to wait, need to look something as a part of a conversation, or I’m still at the table long after dinner has finished. For those times having a PC to hand is useful.
Yeah…tablet during dinner…what has this world gone to!
Formal meals here tend to be very long with tons of conversation. I frequently pull out my phone to check some fact or other. In the past I’ve had an old notebook set up in the kitchen for my recipes…a tablet would be much better. All of this is niche, but most computer users are casual.
I use my new iPad2 all the time since I got it a few weeks ago. It’s just wonderful. (I’ve never owned a smartphone). I read the interwebs in bed. I can just whip it out in the kitchen to get a recipe up on the screen. Even my mum figured out how to use it without any help whatsoever. The best bit though, is though it cost a small fortune, it’s probably the best toy Seren (my 2yr old) has ever had. She wants to play on it all the time, and it absorbs her for hours! I’m hoping it won’t turn her into a video game junkie but instead might teach her how to read sooner rather than later. She likes drawing on it too.
I was a tablet sceptic - no more! I am even rolling up my sleeves to get to grips with C++ now as I’m getting more determined to write some games for it.
Cas 
Oh well there’s a nice success story
This pretty much sums up my examples. It’s not that I desperately want to be able to use a tablet whilst eating, it’s more that if I wanted to use a PC for just 30 seconds, I should be able to.
Tablets open up thousands of one-off niche examples where they can be used.
“Oh, no! <That plane is on fire|I forgot to buy milk|Something random bad happened>!”
“Ah! What in the world do we do?!”
“FEAR NOT LOWLY COMMONERS, FOR I HAVE A TABLET…”
Uh. I don’t like tablets. They are like a fusion of laptops and smartphones, and for me they can’t even fill in any of those two roles. I’d rather have a dumb phone, a PSP and a PC/Laptop, not one insanely expensive tablet that’s worse at communication, gaming and programming.
I don’t wish to start a flame war though. If tablets are the best thing that happened to you since toasted bread, please ignore me.
I do believe it’s sliced bread 
I always say toasted bread. I mean, cutting something up with knife isn’t as ingenious as burning it in a toaster.
Yes but cutting it into 28 identical slices is quite an achievement
Cas
Please cut Microsoft into 28 slices and throw them into your trash bin.
More seriously, I’m really worried by the UEFI and the secure boot which would prevent the installation of any other OS on a lot of consumer machines. I know that a lot of people here don’t mind but this thing looks like a piece of Palladium / “trusted” computing. Bootkits and rootkits are only excuses to provide this bad solution.
[quote]They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
[/quote]
Benjamin Franklin
Microsoft will never get away with this. Market regulators will issue extraordinary high fines for such activities.
Microsoft simply hasn’t the leverage anymore to force all OEMs to use the secure boot path, governments or no. What this does allow is for said OEMs to enable said path and lock down the device. And you know what, there are circumstances where I think that’s a good idea. Not for general purpose consumer devices, but for industrial control panels or patient chart tablets carried by hospital staff, you betcha.
It’s probably done for Enterprise customers. They would want to be able to lock down the machine as much as possible, and make it difficult/annoying to steal. For them, this makes perfect sense.
I do not believe this will make it onto consumer machines. It is too big of a restriction. They also wouldn’t have a beautiful new boot loader if they were planning to prevent installing other OS’s.
Haha! It does make sense!
“We have a beautiful new boot loader! Nothing works on it!”
MS have been known to use their special discounts to force the big OEMs to do what they want, if they don’t they simply don’t get the special discounts and are sold windows at the normal OEM prices. OEMs can’t afford to risk this as it raises computer prices and ability to complete in an already crowded market. The guise of security here is genius though as it puts the burden on the OEM to make the decision and MS can just play the security card if anyone points a finger at them.
If nobody complains about it, nothing will prevent Microsoft from doing it. Most consumers don’t even know what an OS is 