Questions for iPad skeptics

Point one is misinformed. Netbooks had a great year in 2009, with 2010 expected to be even better.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10421063-1.html

Just how many ipads does Apples expect to sell?

I question point 3 as well. Android was underway long before iPhone was announced. While you can say future Android development might have been influenced by iPhone, the project was started with zero knowledge of Apple's plan.

At its core, the iPad is a web browsing box. Viability of that form factor has never been a question to me. It was so much not a question to TechCrunch's Mr. Arrington, that he devoted significant resources to making "a Macbook Air-thin touch screen machine that runs Firefox" [1].

Ignore the walled garden closed ecosystem problem, though it sucks a great deal. The question on the viability of the product, to all, but to skeptics especially, is "can /you/ surf the web without flash?" And I'm not talking about Hulu, which I bet there'll be an app for, soon enough; I'm not talking about youtube, as I assume the iPad will have the same level of compatibility as the iPhone. I'm talking about everything else. The sprinkling of flash on many sites, with no 'alt' text, that say see the pretty animation here, and sans-flash just has an empty box with no explanation. The non-youtube video sites, the 'designer' flash-only sites with no alternative for navigation.

[1] http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/21/we-want-a-dead-simple-w...

"Can Apple’s success with its walled-garden environment be characterized and justified in free-market capitalist terms? I.e., do you believe that Apple’s policy of encouraging consumers to forego certain freedoms in exchange for greater utility, and consumers’ decision to accept that tradeoff is an ethical one, in that ethical framework?"

Exactly! iPad will not kill openess it will inspire open platforms to be better.