A friend (I use the term loosely) pointed out the Nexus 7. Without that, I wouldn’t have given it another thought.
In my focus of studies, it would be nice to have the tablet for software development (should I like to take a bit of initiative). In this way, it would be a great piece of hardware capable of running alongside some good hardware. Maybe it doesn’t have every feature that every other tablet has, but that’s okay.
Now, if I ignore the educational aspect, and look at it like I look at my computer, phone, etc… Well, it’s not quite something I would totally go after, but only due to the shorness of storage. In my style of living, I am very much offline and disconnected from any kind of network whatsoever. All my media will have to be local to the device, and I will have to have enough storage that I won’t have to sync every time I want to change media out. I can put a few bits of my favorite video clips and music on there, but at the end of the day, I would end up having to get a MiFi to make good use of the tablet.
Ignoring the storage of music and movies, it would be perfect for me. Good specs at a decent price seems like a promising combination, and I would definitely get some good use out of it as a reading device when within range of WiFi (or books & cached content when offline). I’m not a heavy game player, but knowing I could sling birds around without hesitation is nice. It would be handy to have support for external devices beyond a handful of Bluetooth devices, memory cards, and a select few cameras (yes, I’m looking at the iPad for that one).
Even the front camera might be of use to me as I keep in contact with friends spread all over the place once school is back in session. It could save me the trouble of breaking out my laptop while still affording a bit of screen real estate so I can actually see with whom I’m chatting.
One thing people still worry about is application support. The number of quality applications for Google’s ecosystem is increasing, but tablets still fall behind phones in that category. Given that I can’t use web applications for everything, and given that Google is only just getting into providing offline support for some of its own web apps, that would be a cause for concern if I didn’t want to try third party apps. But I suppose I would be primarily using this thing for school and in Web-connected environments when I needed anything that doesn’t have a full app version, so no real worries there for me.