You have read comments “along the lines of all entrants to the tablet market are already doomed”, because it is not entirely clear that there is (yet) a “tablet market”.
I think you are quite right about the potential for multiple iPads/”tablets” per household and thus a potentially larger market than PCs. But you said it yourself when you shifted emphasis between your second and third paragraphs — from iPad alone, to “tablet market”.
What commenters are saying: There IS an “iPad Market”; the jury is still out on there being a “tablet market”.
Like Horace said, “Tablet” manufacturers have to first compete with the netbooks, smart phones and iPod Touches. That’s one of their barrier’s to entry. These other three things (even netbooks) are good enough when it comes to the jobs that generic tablets may be hired to do.
But no-one really wants a netbook (a dumbed down PC) after seeing an iPad. So the other companies have to make tablets to move forward into the post-PC world. But why would anyone want an ill-conceived tablet, if it is essentially the same thing as the dead netbook in a slightly different form factor, and no better than my phone or iPod?
These tablet makers are faced with rethinking their products with a new business mindset. It’s a new paradigm: Different OS, different apps, ecosystems, cloud computing, seamless syncing, different and new uses, etc. Companies are going out of business, or getting out of the business, left and right after trying their hand…
Personally, I just don’t see how these PC Guys can just walk into the “tablet market” and make tablets that sell; when Apple, as an engineering and software company, have been doing it for ten years.
————————–
I am wondering if the same thing won’t be true of the “ultra-light laptop market”. There we have another potential market that PC Guys are having a hard time just walking into. Of course this is an evolution of the wider laptop market, and it is not an entirely “new” category like tablets (take 2); but “ultra-light” now seems to be a definable market segment that is replacing the now defunct netbook market. Like phones and the smartphones replacing them in Horace’s countdown, there will at some point be no “ultra-lights”, just laptops. But it’s not as easy as it looks to make good ones.
