Taken as a whole, it seems to me that what we are seeing in the tablet market now is a rerun of the home computer scene of the early '80s. Huge numbers of companies sprang up almost overnight, offering various rehashes of the BASIC programming language, and many of them didn't last too long. Meanwhile IBM concentrated on putting one or two models together and rode out the storm, eventually climbing into bed with Microsoft, and the rest is history.
Today we have Android taking the place of BASIC, and the iPad replacing IBM in the analogy. To the consumer, the tablet market is a bewildering array of devices that look pretty much the same, do pretty much the same and offer little promise for the future. Apple offers something different. It is a brand, and consumers like brands. Other companies can tweak their products as much as they like, but the market doesn't notice. The iPad is good for a year. You know what you are buying, and at the end of the year, when the next model is floated, you still have a useful tool. Apple might cost more in the short term, but it is a longer term investment. Everyone would like the latest and greatest, but my iPad2 is still pretty much current, and the original is not that far behind. Maybe when the next model is announced, iOs will no longer support the iPad1, or maybe it will, but whatever happens, the original buyers won't have a brick on their hands. They will still have a magical piece of glass with some invisible electronics behind it that does what it always did.