The most interesting thing to me is that the Fire doesn't seem to have pretensions about replacing computing, though it theoretically could just as much an iPad or Android tablet. There's an app store, but they seem to be only pushing games on it, and the main thrust seems to sit squarely on consumption.

Especially at this price point, it's not a replacement for a computer, it's squarely a supplement.

I think I prefer this vision to Apple's. It feels more democratic in that I think the iPad wants to replace computing, but privilege consumption at the expense of production.

Amazon's vision is still one of centralized distribution of content, but it strikes me as one that's comfortable coexisting with the Web model of distributed, democratic content production.

Some earlier discussion on the topic: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2955516

[Edit: Here's another take by Nilay Patel of This Is My Next on a similar point: http://thisismynext.com/2011/09/28/editorial-kindle-fire-ipa... ]