Where are your sources for this drivel you're spewing on here? Half of those people were first timers? Are you seriously quoting that half baked article written by Cnet about ONE (singular, isolated) line in NYC on launch day who were buying iPads? What i was saying was half true? Are you kidding me? LOL!
I'm honestly at a loss to your logic here (and was from the beginning when i read the initial post). The numbers speak for themselves, the fact that the iPad spawned countless companies to begin developing and selling their own MIRROR of the iPad speaks for itself.
Didn't deliver? In what possible facet did the iPad not deliver? It CREATED A MARKET SEGMENT! One that many companies tried to crack for the better part of the last DECADE! iPad did it in a blink of an eye!
You're delusional bud.
OK. Let's go back- go all the way back. "The iPad" is popular. It doesn't matter which one. It doesn't matter if it's 1, 2 or 3. The new iPad wasn't any more popular than the old iPad. It's just iPad.
The people who bought the new iPad are the same people who were going to buy the old iPad. They just waited for the new one to come out before they did.
The thing is, everyone was expecting the "iPad 3". Supposed to be a new product of sorts. It wasn't. And so the NEW iPad didn't deliver anything new. For anyone that has an iPad 2, there was no reason to get a new iPad unless you simply wanted a newer iPad and THAT's why people bought it if you want to ask any of our forum members. Just ask around. If you had an iPad 2, the iPad was not marketed to you.
Now even further back, there is no other market segment besides iPad, so far they have been unsuccessful. HP, one of the biggest failure, pretty much almost had to file for bankruptcy because of it. There's the Kindle Fire, but that's not a tablet. That's a Kindle reader.
So yes it "created" a market segment, but at the same time it didn't. I don't know how many times they can afford to fail, but it cant be much longer now. "tablets" are not here to stay. Only the iPad of course.