Devil's advocate: if that is true, then why are macbook pros such a hot sell? I'm typing this here in a college library's lobby. When I look around, I see roughly 3/4 of the laptop-using students are using a macbook pro, with a few macbook airs littered around. If I were to walk around and glance at what people were working on, it'd probably be something like 70% youtube/facebook and 30% using some word processor.
My point is that the consumer's decision to buy or abandon a product isn't solely driven by how good the product is, the value of the new item as a "status icon" also has to be taken into account. All you need to get the customer to justify that $2000 price tag is a culture of rabid consumerism and the garauntee that they will be cooler than their friends if they buy this extremely expensive laptop that does all sorts of things they will never ever use.
In your example involving the 2006 PC and the new iPad, I would argue that a huge contributor to the consumer's abandoning of the PC is because it's nowhere near the potency of a status icon as an iPad is.