Jeff, I'm in total agreement with your thoughts.

Taym, the tablet market is not really like the console market and a number of important differences make the loss-leader strategy an entirely different beast especially. Consoles have a product cycle of at least 5 years - that's a significant amount of time to amortize development and to lower BOM costs. Tablets are refreshed every 6 months to a year, constantly pushing the fringe of current technology.

Consoles have only a small number of companies even attempting to monetize the platforms. Traditionally 3-4 hardware producers and a very small number of software publishers. There aren't 20-50 OEMs also trying to compete on hardware sales here. The hardware produces, also the platform licensors, take a large royalty or license fee for every piece of software sold from every publisher.

As far as the "irrelevant minority" purchasing tablets... Apple are already the industry leader in profits. If you include iPad sales, they are also the industry leader in mobile computers by units. By more than double HP in second place as of this past May. I'll give you that "OTHER" tablets may be insignificant, but the iPad is anything but. It's been a major disruption in portable computing.

For an insignificant product it sure did light the industry on fire with absolutely everyone producing or attempting to produce copycat products. And lastly, as Jeff mentioned, Microsoft's entire focus and strategy has shifted. MS is betting large on the tablet.

MS just need to wake up and realize that they are a software company, not a window company. Not everything needs to have Windows and there's plenty of money to be made with other software.