It's like saying you should be able to produce a new cola and be able to upset CocaCola or Pepsi if you just throw enough money at it. The marketing lead is insurmountable on any reasonable timescale. Besides, Apple markets itself as consumer products, while these other companies (for example RIM) tend to market themselves as corporate products (or at least corporate compatible). They probably don't want to torpedo the momentum they've established with IT decision makers by changing their company's image (though by the time they realize IT decision makers like to have fun too, it might be too late to change).

Apple has had a long dedicated cultish following which they used as the basis of their modern marketing might. They've always been a bit counter-culture, and they somehow still pull that same stance off today.

Those bigger companies probably would love to have the marketing might of Apple, but they lack the momentum. Apple's marketing might is based in large part on many years of this sort of marketing. Even with unlimited resources, it's impossible for someone to come in and just upset that apple cart overnight. The iPad is an extension of the iPhone is an extension of the iPod (they even name them similarly to best capitalize on existing market momentum). Nobody else has that history, and by the time someone else would be able to produce it, the market would no longer care.

My experience is exactly the opposite. I only know one Windows user who has an iPad, but I know around a dozen Mac users who have one. Most Windows users tend to resent having to fire up iTunes as part of the tablet's experience, and would tend to gravitate elsewhere for this reason alone. They also tend to find the walled garden approach a bit restrictive and claustrophobic.

The one Windows user I know with an iPad was given it by his fiancee, because apparently his various "the iPad looks like a bad product" comments were a secret code for "I really wish I had one" according to her. He's now a bigger opponent of the device than before he owned one.

There's no way with services like Amazon EC2 that online distribution costs (including credit card fees) come anywhere close to this.

Maybe marketing would. Depending on the sales volume and how it was advertised, it could either be much more or much less than $3. For most large developers, it would be much less, and for most small developers, it would be much more.

Unfortunately there's no choice no matter whether you have a high cost niche product which markets itself or a small cost broadly popular product which needs to be heard above the noise. You pay a minimum of 43% markup, and it can only go up from there.

There is no chance for anyone else to compete in this space because Apple will not allow it.

Apple takes 30% of the purchase price. This represents a 43% premium you pay for iPhone/iPad apps.

Imagine a $10 product, $3 goes to Apple, $7 goes to the developer. That's 30%, right? Nope, without Apple being in the picture, the developer would make the same profit by selling the app at $7. But they have to sell it for $3 more to make the same money. $3 is 42.9% of $7.

App Store Purchases carry a 43% markup Q.E.D.

One could very well make a point that we are as you educated us to be.

This is what's wrong with the Entitlement Generation. You identify a shortcoming in yourself, but somehow see it as a shortcoming in someone else. This is what leads to the sense of entitlement. As you see it, you've done no wrong, you're only the product of your upbringing, so you shouldn't be held accountable for that.

You are the product of yourself. No matter what you were educated as you can always rise above it. Maybe someone did you a disservice by teaching you these lessons that way, but it's not too late to change yourself and become a well-adjusted adult. Doing so will even come with a substantial competitive advantage; people who take ownership of their own faults even when they didn't know otherwise are the sort of people you can trust with responsibility.

When you become an adult, the only person you have to blame for falling short in any way is yourself, and you should not delude yourself otherwise. Take ownership of your person and make out of yourself who you wish to be. If you wish to be the person who's more interested in assigning blame than in correcting the problem, then don't bitch if employers don't want to hire you.

The Mighty Mouse is made by Apple, and typically included by default with most non-laptop purchases (unless you specifically remove it from your configuration). If you got the mouse from Apple in the past four years (four years yesterday in fact, according to the Wikipedia article), you already have right-click, you might just not have turned it on in System Preferences -> Keyboard & Mouse.

You can even define the behavior of the 3rd & 4th buttons. If you have a laptop, you can enable right-clicking on the trackpad (2 fingers on the pad and click, or if you use tap clicking, tap 2 fingers).

Personally though I don't care for the mighty mouse, I tend to prefer Logitech mice.

If God overrides decisions he disagrees with, then there's no such thing as free will, and that is one of the fundamental tenants of Christianity. The alternative is humans as programmed robots.