Did you even read my post? I don't think Apple is "better" - I think they're great at wagging the dog, the dog being us consumers.
Some will still care for the Apple brand and whatever quality advantage it has but in the end Apple won't be forever selling 5 times what it's competitors are selling.
You don't have to be the best at this point, just managed to sell enough to make some money per run.
You're spot on identifying Amazon as Apple's only real competitor.
Amazon was, however nowadays Google sells music, rents and sells movies, sells books, and of course sells apps. The reason they rebranded the Android market to Google Play is because of this ecosystem.
So - my counter point would be that Google will be a competitor in time.
Why wouldn't tablets be more like, say, the iPod than the iPhone? The phone market is significantly warped by carriers. When people's contract are up, they walk into their carrier store and ask the salesperson what phone to buy. Articles about the Lumia 900 launch indicate AT&T is planning to push it as their primary high-end phone[1]. In this regard Apple does not control their sales channel as they do with all of their other products. This is significant, as recent data show that the vast majority of iPhone buyers purchased their device at the carrier's store[2].
The only real vulnerability Apple has in tablets right now is price, but I think the chances they'll leave a price umbrella where people can continue to swoop in at $199 and undercut the iPad is very small. I expect their pricing to play out like the iPod, where eventually there was a model at every price point from $50 to like $400 at $50 increments. They've also done this with the iPhone, where what started out as either a $500 or $600 phone is now sold for $300, $200, $100, or $0.
If the quality of competing tablets does not improve significantly, there is nothing at all inevitable about the tablet market playing out like the phone market.
1: http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/09/att-going-big-with-lumia-90...
2: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/apple-only...
The phone market is indeed significantly warped by subsidies from the carriers. If carrier subsidies didn't exist (if people didn't fall for it being subsumed into the cost of plans) the iPhone market would never have taken off (Ballmer in his original dismissal of the iPhone was actually right -- people won't pay $600 for a phone. They will, however, pay $149 and pay the rest over the contract period while acting blind to it). Those value options would decimate it.
Aside from that whole "carriers against Apple" bit (completely opposite of reality), the tablet market already is playing out like the smartphone industry. With each successive quarter Apple's share drops (while their volume increases just as in smartphones). They once had it in the bag, and now account for about 1/2 of tablets, heading ever downwards.
The point I made about carriers was about Apple owning their sales channel. Most people buy their phones directly from carriers. Carriers have their own agendas. Thus Apple has less control over the phone sales channel than they do for any other product they sell. It matters. We could debate how much, but it matters. For example, if I walk into an AT&T store and ask the salesperson, "I want a smartphone", and he replies, "This Lumia 900 is our latest and greatest" and so I buy that, my opinion is that that has a real impact on the market.
Regarding your point, though, if carrier subsidies didn't exist, presumably they wouldn't exist for anyone, so who knows what the market would look like? It might favor Apple even more. Their supply chain seems to be the best in the industry. Rivals are having trouble making tablets with similar features for competitive prices, and competing PC manufacturers are having trouble selling ultrabooks for similar prices as MacBook Airs. So wouldn't it stand to reason that in a subsidy-free world, Apple could make a phone for $300 or $400 and still make a healthy profit, but Samsung or HTC or Nokia would struggle to do the same?
> They once had it in the bag, and now account for about 1/2 of tablets, heading ever downwards.
Do you have a link for this? I'm sure you're familiar with discussions of market share based on shipped vs. sold. And this is only anecdotal evidence, but just about everywhere I go -- coffee shops, airports -- all I see are iPads. I've seen maybe 2 or 3 Android tablets (including the Kindle Fire) in the wild ever. Again just anecdotal, but it was pretty clear once Android phones started to gain traction and were selling in real numbers. It doesn't seem that way at all with the tablet market.
I'm not sure that the tablet market will really settle down to look like the iPod market. There is too much money to be made and way more competition than there ever was for portable mp3 players. But I do think a lot of the market fundamentals are the same as they were with the iPod, and assuming Apple removes the price umbrella relatively soon, I think it's going to take a _significantly higher quality product_ than what we're seeing today before competitors start gaining real traction.
Your point isn't even coherent. Apple made the increased resolution the primary selling point of the iPad 3rd gen: Everyone knew they would, and it was the worst kept secret in technology (indeed it was expected almost a year earlier!). Just as with the iPhone 4(s), no one is chasing them: Sure, there are products coming out somewhere in between (the 3rd gen iPad -- love mine, btw -- has a resolution far past the point of diminished returns owing to a naive scaling system), but no one is going to even bother trying to match them because...why.
I can't follow your core narrative because it makes no sense. Somehow Toshiba making different screen sizes is bizarrely behind Apple? What?
I'm not sure how much more clear I can make it. Enjoy your new iPad!