[seltzered]

I still can't grasp where the market is to buy a tablet on a data plan contract.

The problem seems that these hardware-only vendors are trying to extract profit from only their hardware investment instead of either charging a higher price for quality hardware or investing in and charging for a quality app store / user experience.

It would be nice if google set an "experience" tier, where if hardware vendors followed a high standard of hardware quality / display specs they could share some of google's advertising/android market profits.