Apple are the only mainstream company that *doesn't* make cheap plastic crap
While I will admit that few other companies are any better, there is certainly nothing about Apple's hardware that makes it stand out in terms of quality. The iPad and iPhone are very pretty to look at (until they get scratched), but the components are the same asian-made lowest-bidder crap that everybody uses. Even the "magical" A4 processor was revealed as just a repackaged Samsung core.
Where do you get the idea that Apple remove apps after installation. Complete nonsense.
From their own phone-home API, as described and documented
here. Granted they do not seem to have used it yet, and I apologize for this incorrectness in my previous post - they do, however, have a history of removing apps arbitrarily from the
App store which is unacceptable in itself since the it is the only distribution channel for iOS software, effectively denying users control over what software to run.
Enjoy your wait, and enjoy the stability that comes from running an arbitrary OS on an arbitrary piece of hardware where no proper integration testing has been done.
The suggestion that out of every hardware vendor only Apple does proper integration testing is laughable.
If there were a bunch of 10" tablet devices with 8 hour battery life and the Apple one was more expensive, then you could claim this. But there aren't, so it isn't!
I can get a fully-featured PC with a bigger screen and more than sufficient battery life for much less than the price of an iPad, so yes, it's overpriced.