iPad comfortably beats iPhone to 1 million mark - Can other OEMs grab some of the success?

It took the iPhone 74 days to hit the magic 1 million sales mark. The iPad has accomplished the same feat in under half the time.

“One million iPads in 28 days—that’s less than half of the 74 days it took to achieve this milestone with iPhone,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Demand continues to exceed supply and we’re working hard to get this magical product into the hands of even more customers.”

It's not much to expect Apple to shift some 5 million iPads this year.

iPad owners have also been spending money in Apple's App Store, with over 12 million app downloads and 1.5 million ebooks purchased from Apple's newly created iBookstore.

Building an ecosystem from zero to a million in a month is serious traction. Say what you will about the iPad, but this milestone is a clear indication to the rest of the industry that there was a significant gap in the market for an internet enabled tablet system.

So where's the competition? Well, so far, the iPad doesn't have a natural predator, and it seems that it might stay that way, for a while at least. Microsoft's pulled the plug on its Courier project, and it seems that HP's Slate is also dead. But this doesn't mean that the iPad will face no future competition. Dell, Nokia and Toshiba seem to all be still in the running, but information on devices is scant.

It's hard to see what form this competition will take. Will it be in the form of Windows 7-based devices, an OS which might not be well suited to use on touch-enabled devices, or will the competition come in the form of devices running Linux or perhaps something like Palm's webOS?

While tablets aren't a new, success of a system with a tablet form-factor is very much a new thing.

What would YOU like to see from a tablet?