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Would be nice to be able to get a subsidized iPad. But I do have a couple of comments:

why isn't this tablet 4G?

Because 4G exists nowhere in this country, and the 3.5G they're passing off as 4G only exists in limited areas. Apple generally doesn't go with something until it's widely available, as they did with 3G in the first place.

the Xoom is heavier, but it has a better screen

No, it has a higher-resolution, but lower-quality screen.

It will run Flash, which means you can pretty much watch Web video as you do on your laptop or PC.

You can do that on an iPad too, since YouTube and others have been transcoding away from Flash to H.264 for a while.

If you have serious competition, that’s going to compress profit margins.

That's what I'm hoping for. I thought Xoom would come out better than it did. Here's to hoping Xoom 2 will be serious iPad competition.

Apple generally doesn't go with something until it's widely available,

Unless they can single-handedly MAKE it widely available. The iMac forced the peripheral makers to support USB. The Mac Plus made SCSI kinda mainstream. Thunderbolt will bypass USB3 before it is even out. Firewire is preferred by those who needed heavier use and low-latency.

What's the difference? Apple has serious control over Firewire and Thunderbolt. Apple cannot make the phone company perform. Apple also stays away from established standards that it just doesn't like. They made SCSI laser printers, but never made a Mac with a (Centronics or 1EEE-1284)parallel port.

the Xoom is heavier, but it has a better screen

No, it has a higher-resolution, but lower-quality screen.

Here's proof:

Ars Technica's creative director posted this micro photo in the comments section to show that the Xoom's supposedly "superior" resolution screen was NOT superior at all... In fact, it is nowhere near superior!

"I also found the Xoom screen almost grainy, the pixel grid is too apparent to the naked eye. You don't really notice it so much on a photo, or something with a lot of tonal changes, but on say a white background like Google or an eBook you see faint pixel grid lines. We decided to not include this photo in the Xoom review, but I took this closeup shot of both screens with a 100mm Canon macros lens, same image on both, same distance from camera (tripod), same area of the image focused on. To my eye that Xoom pixel grid explains why I see it from a normal distance too, it's just a much larger gap:

I could talk about a lot of other things I didn't care for, but for me personally and my tablet uses (YMMV) the screen was already a non-starter.

Thanks antiRepublicrat.

You can do that on an iPad too, since YouTube and others have been transcoding away from Flash to H.264 for a while.

That's also true of FR -- recent vids tucked between messages one and two on various threads have that standard link about how my computer won't do H.264.