It is rare that we agree... so I've found something to disagree with you about - a little bit...

"iOS is popularly considered by most commenters on these tech boards as a content-consumption-only platform, yet professional artists, photographers and writers use their iPads in the field and often nearly exclusively under highly mobile circumstances. This is as much due to the fact of the high number of professional applications available--including Photoshop for iPad--as it is due to the iPad's ready synchronization to OS X applications that don't require manual triggering."

I'd say that iOS is constantly promoted as a content creation and delivery device by a lot of Technology Bloggers. I roll my eyes and bite my tongue every time Bill Detwiler pulls out his iPad at the TR-Live event to give a power-point presentation, and ZDNet's James Kendrick drives me NUTS with his constant blogs about how he can't settle for anything less than his iPad for his remote mobile content-creation goals. I can name a handful of other bloggers who are incredibly bullish about iOS as well, but I'll keep that card up my sleeve for now. Too many bloggers wear rose-tinted glassed with their iOS device opinions and it misleads consumers into thinking that the device will satisfy them in ways it probably won't. No offense to either of the writers I'm calling out here - the device does work well for them I am certain. But there are *better* choices for anyone (especially typical users) with a focus on those particular tasks. They just don't have an Apple logo on them.

As for your examples, I acknowledged that there are some niches where Apple does have a lead in productivity goals at the moment. They're the same kind of leads where Mac originally had a lead on Microsoft. Eventually, the open-platform alternatives (and I'm including Microsoft here because Microsoft has always supported the open-hardware platform) caught up and matched or exceeded Macintosh in most cases, as well as offering all the other superiority that they had all along. This was almost the end of Apple last time. We'll see how well they weather it when it happens with this generation of personal computing. I didn't list every example where iOS has carved out a strong niche - but if you happen to be in one of those fields where iOS has the lead currently, you probably already know it, and I don't begrudge anyone who decides to go with iOS based on those criteria. But they're all *niches*. Overall, iOS is a consumer content consumption device. The fact that the Kindle Fire is the most successful Android tablet just shows the huge consumer demand for exactly THAT kind of device (and that a powerful but less expensive alternative to Apple has a lot of market share to claim). Other Android tablets with a more productivity oriented focus have enjoyed a halo effect from the Kindle and the Nexus 7, the ASUS TF line in particular - and many of those are more powerful and more flexible devices with a goal of delivering a productivity/consumption hybrid.

But those are all trivial little differences of opinion influenced one way or the other by our personal biases. I agree with your overall assessment, and I think the fact that I am *very* interested in Windows 8 *and* RT devices right now points to the threat that Android faces at the moment. Microsoft is more of a threat to Google than to Apple as things sit today, and as we see them build momentum, understanding and enthusiasm, your projections may be spot on.

In either case, +1 to you, sir.