It's been a few years and their value proposition is the same as as a few years back: yay, vastly less power/performance, lower resolution, crappier sound, no keyboard, and just about equally painless in terms of weight or form-factor. Sure they're a bit smaller and lighter but just at a point in time where the weight and size of current-gen netbooks/ultrabooks/notebooks simply isn't an issue anymore anyway.

Smartphones, I get them. Neat to have a Maps app with a phone attached in your pocket. And commuters can play Sudoku on them, fine.

But tablets? What's the big appeal about them? Why have they become such a popular gadget for all their shortcomings compared to same-generation net/ultrabooks? I don't think I'll ever get it...

But since we're on Hacker News... what exactly is a Hacker Newser missing out on by forgoing a tablet?

The people I've seen using a tablet most expansively are some combination of:

A. people never fully comfortable with a full laptop (meaning they effectively aren't losing much functionality by switching), in fact are gaining from the simplification of features they never really got

B. People doing field work, where a tablet's weight and form factor is strongly superior to a laptop (lighter, can operate standing up easily, etc.)

C. People who like to surf the web in bad, but find using the form factor of a laptop too awkward and a smartphone screen too small

Not so. The only laptop with more pixels than a Nexus 10 is Apple's 15" Retina Macbook Pro. The 13" has the same WQXGA resolution as the Nexus, and every other laptop on the market is lower. For a short time, the iPad 3 was actually the highest resolution portable computer on the market, though a few obsolete mobile workstations matched its resolution.

Laptop makers ought to get off their collective asses and do something about this.