If not the ipad then...

Not looking to pick a fight here, it's just that I've never heard of a cool Windows Phone 7 exclusive app, nor have I heard any grand Window Phone 7 developer success  stories. I'm really not prepared to comment on the quality and breadth of those 80,000 apps.

You're right that Microsoft is trying really hard with dev tools and incentive programs, but at the end of the day, what they need is a market that will buy apps. One of the "successful" developers in that story has moved 30,000 downloads of a free and ad-free app, thereby generating zero revenue. Hobbyist developers can do some cool stuff from time to time, but professional developers usually require a paycheck at the end of the day.

And it won't be a very good tablet at 3.5 lbs. and a 13" screen. Yeah, that's something I want to hold in my hands for more than a few minutes at a time.

Besides, I need a laptop with a screen larger than 13". Again, your statement fails because not everybody needs the same things in a computer/tablet. In a laptop, I need a desktop replacement. A screen no smaller than 15", a top of the line processor with dedicated graphics card, and the ability to swap HDDs/externals/whatever. It needs to be a full-fledged computer or it won't work for me. For a tablet, I just need something that browses, checks email, and runs basic apps. In my world, those two devices are best left separate because the device is either going to be too heavy/big/power hungry or it's going to be underpowered/too small.

Not to mention that the Yoga isn't going to be released for six more months.

And given sales of apps for WM7, its unlikely they are ever going to have apps of note or usefulness in comparison to whats on Android or iOS.

@famousringo and mrstickball

Im out for the night and can't look for specific examples and apps but there are lots of very successful windows phone exclusive apps. I am on every windows phone news and xna developers RSS feeds and and every week a new success story is shared by a dev. Usually windows phone apps perform better than Android counterparts.

Look up Elbert Perez for a very successful developer exclusive to windows phone.

This guy, huh:

http://www.wpcentral.com/2011-lessons-learned-windows-phone-developer

So, he has twelve games to his name and they earned him $61,000 last year. I'm supposed to believe that this guy is capable of churning out a quality game every month or so and that an average of $5,000 revenue per app is big success? That's a decent income, sure, but a single good app on iOS can make an indie dev a millionaire (granted, those million sellers usually take more than 30 days of work to make).

I understand, personally I don't care too much about tablets yet. But I also understand it can be a quite a useful device, and yes it's different form a laptop.

A friend of mine usually goes to work by train, he can use it to read newspaeper, while listening to music and also check the something on the internet, it's a way smaller, more confortable and quicker to boot up than a regular laptop. Yes it's also expansive, but on the other hand my friend saves about 12euro/month on newspapers and magazines, since ipad subcriptions are cheaper than paper subcriptions. So every year he pays back about 140euro of the ipad price.

At the moment I'm ok with my laptop and my mp3 payer, but in a few years I can see myself buying one, also with these things like the Asus Transformer and the Windows8 OS, I think they're going in the right direction.

I see your point but you shouldn't take the assumption that all of those games he created last year suddenly stopped selling. And that $61,000 was probably back-loaded; in January and February when he had 1-2 games for sale, he probably made squat. By November and December when he had close to a dozen for sale, he probably made the bulk of that $61,000 in those two months. It takes time to build a catalog large enough to sustain a living and those old games aren't suddenly going to disappear because the calendar flipped to 2012.

Youre right that this isnt a massive success, however ive been reading a lot of small dev success stories on windows phone. Elber Perez games really arent anything special. Really simple games some of which are not even that good, however he has had success with them on WP.

Here is another dev that made $ 100,000 on a single game. http://www.wpcentral.com/windows-phone-game-taptitude-hits-100k-mark

As far as bigger players and devs, there have been many reports that windows phone marketplace performs astonishingly well for howmany users they have. http://www.everythingwm.com/fruit-ninja-over-7-times-more-revenue-on-windows-phone-compared-to-android/2011/03/09/

So while no one is going to argue that wp app store can go toe to toe with iOS in terms of revenue, it does just fine on its own terms.

Well, the WP App Store doesn't have to go toe-to-toe with the App Store, it only has to challenge Play. If WP is able to get a toe-hold, I think it's going to come mainly out of Android's marketshare, not Apple's. I think both developers and customers of Android choose that platform out of necessity, not any crazy-wild-love for the ecosystem. If MS is able to bridge iOS and Android, creating an easy-to-develop-for, stable, and consistent environment, they will challenge Google. It's just a question of whether they can do that. Google has made a lot of mistakes that MS knows to avoid from their decades of OS experience.