In my direct experience, which of course is not a scientific study of any sort, 99% - or maybe more - of the people I know who own an iPad are exactly like Doug's wife, albeit to various degrees and in various ways.

And I don't mean it in a negative sense. It is perfectly fine to me that people buy whatever they wish for whatever reason they choose. It is a fact that I observe. The iPad is very largely a social phenomenon. You can't fight that type of war only with a rich feature set, or with the promise (as real as it may be) to offer the same potential than a laptop if you wish, or stating that you'll bring the effectiveness of the same UX across many devices types, or witha device that can join cirporate domain, access NTFS+ACLs, print on your shared network printer at home or in the office - all great things for me, all reasons that I very much like MS approach with Windows 8, besides liking the OS per se. Those are all order winners to me.

But my point is that's just not enough. You can't rely on customers evaluating some technical benefits if most of your customers could not care less about technical benefits, provided a basic feature set is there.

I think not only MS needs to have many Apps and the right ones; which means establishing a strong ecosystem. But also and even more importantly MS needs a toy to be perceived as a valid alternative to the cool toy - iPad; it needs to be "the latest toy" to make many customers curious and then proud to own it, even if they just use it to scroll pictures or play mp3s. Nothing to do with whether or not it comes with an x86 cpu, or if it can run real office, or if it grants access to the NTFS file system+ACLs, or if it can join your corporate domain, or if it can print on your shared network printer both at home and in the office. , etc. etc.

I actually see little alternatives there other than >also< using a fierce price battle (even though $199 is very, very low and may be too much to sustain) because you need to put the new toy in people's hands to begin with.

Indeed I see interesting things happening before year end.