@jerv as usual has some great points. The cloud is not to be trusted, and as otherwise noted if you’re offline you’re out of luck. And thanks for those links, Jerv ! I had not seen the external drives like that.
Your satisfaction with a tablet will depend a lot on what you want to do with it. If you are trying to replace your desktop/laptop you could be frustrated by the inherent limitations of
the form factor. By the time you’[ve added a bunch of local storage and a keyboard/mouse so you can get “work” done at a practical pace you might as well get a nice laptop.
If you’re social networking or trolling the web or playing music or some of the simple games that are available then the tablet can be great.
The androids tend to come with a good bit of Google’s cloud apps well integrated and that can make it very easy to use all those resources while you have a connection.
The app stores for tablets are very convenient and make it much easier and fun to explore new software than it is on a regular PC/mac.
I think it’s interesting to see Apple moving toward an app store model for their regular computers, although I do NOT like that they control that market way too much and take a piece of the action on every purchase.
I’ve had an ASUS transformer for two weeks now and I love it. It has more connectivity/ports/memoryExpansion available than the iPad, and has the option to add a dock/keyboard that doubles the battery capacity and provides regular-size USB ports.
I took it on a trip for a week and had no problem whatsoever. The battery life is very good already and it has good Wifi capability to ferret out open WAPs.
But I don’t intend to replace my home machines with the tablet, it’s another member of the computing gadget stable.