Notionally, this is a forum for creators, but it seems increasingly pre-occupied with utterly unproductive posturing over whose tastes are 'better'. It's a troubling trend.
Tastes define what we create and how we create it. Tastes inform what we choose to compromise and what we protect in the process of making things.
So as we venture into new worlds – Surface vs. iPad vs. Android vs. Kindle may superficially be consumer products but more crucially they are platforms for building the future for a mass audience – it's natural that we're going to have to spill a lot of thought figuring out what's most important to us.
Will there be disagreement? Yeah. Will it be perfectly civilized? Almost certainly not, given rarity of good manners, social skills and healthy conflict management.
But that's life with the apes.
What I find crucial is that the way this competition plays out will determine who is permitted to create, and what. Open tools encourage clever human beings, while crippled appliances give consumers learned helplessness. This is far more important than how shiny or expensive our gadgets are.