Seriously, though, the Wayland effort appears to be throwing out every advantage the X11 display had over the Windows display for a replacement that will probably never be quite as good as a Windows.

Emphasis is mine. Other than network transparency, what advantages did X11 have that Wayland doesn't? What other advantages did X11 have period?

Losing network transparency will effect some people, but there are some solutions to that. I'd wager the majority of linux GUIs deployed in the world don't use that feature (between embedded stuff like TiVos, normal desktops, TVs running Linux, etc). But I can tell you from more than 10 years of following Linux development that no one seems to actually like X11. From what I've read the various GUI developers seem to love Wayland compared X and can't wait for it to take over. X seems to be a giant ball of mud that's always getting in peoples way, hampering performance, and a pain in the ass to configure. The fact that it handles hardware setup, drawing, input, network transparency, fonts, 3D, and so much more it's clearly not following the unix philosophy of small tools doing one job.

Every time Wayland comes up, people come out of the woodwork to declare it a failure because it won't run over a network, but that's the only real gripe I've seen. You say there are others, I'm curious to know what they are.

I guess I was thinking of the iPad 1, although you might be able to get closer refurb. I still think the battery life is a big issue. An extra $50 to add another 4 or 5 hours of battery life would have easily been worth it.

Given that you can get generic "real" laptops for about that price, I'm still don't see a real compelling argument. The 3G is nice, but you don't get much data. At this point the average user has no idea these things exist, and I'm don't think this new model is really going to change that.

It feels more like a "we can make cheap computer and OS too!" kind of project than a real effort at making a dent in the market.

So it's slightly cheaper than an older iPad, but gets worse battery life. It has a fraction of the software of an iPad, and isn't as easy to whip out and use since you have to fold out the keyboard. It's less features than an netbook (which you could restrict down to be malware free) but at the same cost.

I'm just not sure about the value on these things.

For the record, I just Googled "Samsung Jelly Bean" and found that story. I wanted to choose a phone I knew was popular so there was a chance at having data. I didn't know it had compatibility issues, I simply recognized the name and figured it might make a decent comparison.

By "across all their devices" I simply meant that people were upgrading. I didn't mean that as a jab against the Android release process (which I know is a disaster due to the carriers, what isn't that carriers touch).

I simply meant "this well known Android phone got an update, in a similar time frame to Apple, how many people updated that phone"? I wasn't trying to compare the full platforms.

According to c|net, as of yesterday Verizon Galaxy Nexus users could download Jelly Bean. Within 24 hours, Apple had 15% penetration across all their devices. I wonder what the percentage is of Galaxy Nexus users?

Are there any very popular Android phones that have received an update in the last year or so that had the update adopted that fast?

I don't know what the Android process is like, but I can say that the iOS process is really slick. At this point, Apple has it down to a science. The update was trivial to install, didn't take too long, and was easily configured on first boot. The 5.1 update process (which was the first delta update, so it was only ~50 MB instead of 700+) was especially fast.

Some people will, because they always want the latest and the best. But there are a lot of people like me (with an iPhone 4) or my little sister (who has a 3GS) who are eligible for the full subsidy and for whom it's a major upgrade. For me it's much faster, includes Siri, and a much better camera. For my little sister it's vastly faster, includes a retina display, Siri, a vastly better camera, it's thinner, etc.

Not everyone ordering is coming off a 4S. I'd imagine most are coming from the 4 or below.