Here is my best guess:

1: Paywall goes up.
2: Pageviews and visit stats drop like a rock.
3. [weeks/months later] Consumers realize that the NYTimes content is in fact higher quality than what they can access for free elsewhere.
4. Some percent of their pre-paywall consumers purchase online subscriptions.
5. Profit!

But after a few days, I went ahead and replaced 9.10 with a fresh install of Windows 7 (64-bit). As loathe as I am to admit it, Win7 is a much more polished, finished, stable product. For my hardware at least, Win7 is a much more effective operating system.

Of course, YMMV.

Skips over the newscaster BLAH BLAH BLAH:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qER69SvyYV8#t=0m48s

NOTE: The Long Tail theory of economics has been fairly well refuted since the publication of the book...for most industries, at least:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121493784638920147.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

I had to laugh when I came to this paragraph:

"If the Hurst e-reader is easy to use, inexpensive and isn't as locked down as the Kindle, I would give it a chance."

I would give them a 25% chance of it being easy to use, and about 10% chance of making it inexpensive enough to convince a large segment of their subscriber population to consider it affordable. I will give them a 0% chance it being less DRM-restricted than the Kindle.

In other words, this device will fail miserably.