What made the Ipad (and the Iphone and the Ipod) a success was the fact that Apple created a new category that didn't exist before and marketed the hell out of it. All the me-too products make the fatal mistake of trying to make a product that's better than Apple's in the category that Apple invented and owns.
No matter how hard you try to make a product that's an Ipad-killer you'll never succeed because it's not an Ipad. It's like the cheap knock-offs of brand names - the chinese Konferse shoes might look like Converse, they might be cheaper and they might even be better but nobody will buy them because they aren't the original Converse.
If you want to own a niche you have to innovate your way there. You can't out-ipad and ipad. One of the commenters in the article even called it a palmpad.
I remember an interview with Jonathan Ive (Apple's chief designer) where he was asked what he would make if he was given the task of creating a phone for another company. His answer was "I don't know, but I do know that it would be nothing like the Iphone"