My taste appears to differ from yours in this respect.

Which makes "a lot of things" useless to people who need to run a compiler and its output. The iPad and Surface RT are among them.

I guess I made this mistake because WhatsApp has been fairly aggressive over the past week at blocking third-party clients, and I seem to remember that Snapchat "expressly prohibits" their use.

Agreed. And with programming classes becoming more widespread in high schools, a lot of parents will have to upgrade their kids from an iPad to at least a Raspberry Pi if not a full-scale PC.

This is where my taste differs. During freezing or wet weather, I ride public transit to and from work, and in my satchel I carry a 10" laptop on which to work on hobby programming projects.

Then why doesn't each 450,295 km^2 chunk of the USA have Swedish-class Internet?

Then what's the cheaper way to cross non-subscribers' private property to reach subscribers without tearing up roads?

Cloud services don't work for an offline iPad.

...Phone. I visited with Windows 8.1 and got these:

• "Need an account? Download the app to sign up."
• Don't have an account? Download the app to sign up! That page's Windows button took me to the Windows Phone Store, which in turn gave me an error message "You need a Windows Phone with a linked Microsoft account before you can get apps from the Store."
• Blank black screen.

From the Android download page: "Tablet devices are not supported". I have no smartphone. Is a smartphone still a luxury, or has it become a necessity?

Is BlueStacks based on Google Play or AOSP? Android distributions based on AOSP lack Google Play Store and thus cannot download Google Play Store-exclusive applications. In any case, it appears that BlueStacks is something that "everyone's gonna have to install" just as Flash Player and Java used to be; did I miss something in my assessment?

When you need to haul people, you can take the bus. What's the computing equivalent of public transit? And does it have the same drawback of not operating at night or on Sunday?

An 80-column-wide window with a 6-pixel-wide font is 480xsomething inside the chrome, which means two 80-column-wide windows can comfortably fit side-by-side.

On Windows RT you also can't run a compiler and its output.

The display in my Dell Inspiron mini 1012 is even "worse" at 1024x600, yet 120 dpi doesn't cause a problem for my use cases. If you hate 16:9, think of it as two 8:9 windows side by side. And side by side is something you can do on a netbook or x86 tablet that you can't do on tablets that run a phone OS.

A Windows laptop starts at $200 (source: hp.com) and should last at least four years if not physically mistreated. You may have to replace the rechargeable battery at the two-year mark, but I don't expect that to cost more than $60. How much does four years of cellular Internet access cost, let alone the EC2 or Azure subscription on top of that?

WhatsApp, Vine, Instagram, Snapchat...

The problem comes when a student needs a computer for homework or a hobby, but the parent is unwilling to provide one because "You have an iPad; why aren't you happy with that?" See previous comments by betterunixthanunix and Anonymous Coward.

Both to them and to the cellular carrier. Connecting to them requires a valid subscription to Internet access. Doing so while riding transit requires a separate subscription to cellular Internet access in addition to what you already pay for Internet at home.

Anything that requires multiple windows on screen at once. One example is using a calculator that doesn't fill the screen. Another example is putting a source code window on one half of the screen and the output window on the other half.

Or applications that Apple has not approved. One of them is programming for a class or a hobby. Last time I checked, programming on iOS was limited to a small selection of interpreters for dynamically typed scripting languages such as Codea (a Lua interpreter) and Pythonista (a Python interpreter). On a netbook, on the other hand, if I want to use C++, Java, Fortran, 6502 assembly language, or any other language, usable tools are a sudo apt-get install away.

(For the purposes of this post, I'm treating the ASUS Transformer Book, Surface Pro 3, and other Windows x86 tablets as laptops. My objection is not to the tablet form factor but to the restrictions inherent in iOS.)