My tone tends to be stuck in "Devil's advocate" mode while here, but I'd have to say it's wise to know what the rest of the folks are doing; especially in tech. The majority is unfortunately dictating what options we, the very vocal minority of people (read: we don't need no stinkin' fart apps, give us terminal instead) will have access to unless we somehow find pockets of like-minded people... like here at TMO.

Read above... and for reasons

And those sheeple are unfortunately who the majority of R&D and marketing and products are being pushed towards and we're piggybacking whatever is out there and shoehorning our wants in a very incomplete manner on existing hardware.

My point I want to really make is that without options that fit the minority in a grander manner (read: geeks want terminal, geeks get terminal) but in a more uniform manner lest we build a fragmented approach to handling our geekery and it'll never get addressed and the sheeple will be totally fulfilled. Can't sell a properly R&D device to just one person. That's why you should care and get other likeminded people that would actually buy the damn thing to care.

Come together on something, or keep bickering about (take your pick: shell, GUI, encryption cipher, distro, kernel, package management, etc) and ignoring everybody else and you will be left out.

That's what is happening. It's great to be an individual. But companies need to make profit. A whole bunch of folks not caring about each other reduces the chances of profitability to near zero.

Comes off soapbox...

I personally think that Copernicus is onto something. Mer is indeed powerful. And it's something that could be shoved onto many other devices and a ton of UI's slammed on top of it. Viola! Instant geek tablet.

But who'd buy it still remains. I, for the life of me cannot figure out any use cases for terminal only on a tablet - all of the virtual keyboards I've seen suck and slow me down and if I add a bluetooth keyboard, I might as well use my laptop.

tl;dr

I'd like to see a geek tablet come out though. I just question if it would sell. And I'd say with confidence, no it would not because geeks are just an unhappy bunch about much too damn much.