With iPad, Apple has perfect form-factor, perfect battery life, perfect UI, perfectly fit for UI applications.
Any differentiations from that lead to less usable variants, which can not beat Apple's level of sales at all (Apple contracted manufacturers to produce 13 million IPS displays for iPad, so you can guess the volume).
And even if someone will match Apple's key features I listed (which is not seen soon at all), then public still already has perfectly fit iPad devices and there is no any significant reason why would they want to choose non-iPad.
(No, having USB port or videocamera will have no real value to customers, comparing to key features I listed above.)
As to "smartphone games", Apple does not dominate smartphone market yet at all; it only dominates "new smartphones" category, which it created three years ago.
However, the fact it is HP who bought Palm makes no difference since companies of all calibres tried to attack Apple's dominance in their "new smartphone" market, and they can not compete yet.
For example, Android devices (with OS which is at least no worse than WebOS) with all of the money could not shatter Apple even a tinniest bit.
Last week, in Palm, a Silicon Valley soap opera, I opined that HP had overspent to the tune of $1,195,000,000 when it bought Palm for $1.2 billion. After reading two fascinating articles and thinking about the deal all weekend, I’m thinking instead that HP may have made a very smart move.
First, let me credit the two writers. The first is our own Jason Perlow, who wrote HP’s Slate was an Ugly Baby with Windows 7 and basically claimed that the Slate would never have been a contender running just Windows 7.
The second article was by the wise and very French Jean-Louis Gassée who wrote Very Personal Computing. In it, Jean-Louis contends that the financial gravity of the computing world has shifted to smartphones.
He claims:
The smartphone isn’t just a new genre, it’s nothing less than a reboot of personal computing.
I knew Jean-Louis back in the 1980s, when he was the head of the “Paris” project at Apple, the creation of the Mac II — the first very beige, very boxy, color Macintosh. During Steve Jobs’ wilderness years, Jean-Louis provided much of the vision for Apple engineering and in my opinion held Apple together spiritually until Jobs returned.
