Are you serious? A well designed ecosystem is much more important than trying to increase the number of gigahertz/megaflops every release. Just because a corvette is more powerful and way cheaper than a Ferrari/Porsche it does not mean that you will have a better experience than buying one of the latter.

> "The poor specs lead to a poor UX, so I fail to see the difference."

The inverse is not true. See the early reviews of the Kindle Fire HD, where the device is described as sluggish and laggy despite having better specs than the Nexus 7.

So the fact that something has faster hardware does not mean the one has a UX advantage over the other.

If UX was determined by specs, why would we have a different name for it?

That makes no sense. The first iPhone had an excellent overall UX for its time with a pathetic 128MB of RAM. The subjective experience of performance matters more than numbers on a spreadsheet, and for that we'll have to wait for hands-on reports.

Also, bear in mind that the mini doesn't have to push around 4X pixels like the Retina iPads, so it can get by with less RAM and processor.

I think you are not Apple's target user.

I, personally, would buy the Kindle Fire. Most people, however, will buy the iPad Mini. Bigger price and all.

Curiously enough, I think the iPad 2 has just become the most compelling tablet in the market in terms of price/specs/performance. I'm wondering if iPad 2 will eat into sells of the new iPads? And would Apple care?

Anyway, interesting times.

Not when the software is superior.

Take a look at some videos of the Kindle. That hardware is clearly not going towards the UX because that thing is so laggy.