No, I’m not about to start bitching about Apple’s flagship gizmo and what it can or can’t do (although, if you want to buy me a beer or two in meatspace, I’d be more than happy to give you my two uninformed but moderately passionate cents on that).

Instead, I’m just going to point to evidence of exactly what I’ve been saying would happen: that within a very short amount of time after the iPad’s launch, you’d be able to get cheaper hardware with the same or greater functionality, and run a FOSS operating system on it that lets you get applications from anywhere you choose. So, via eBooknewser, here’s a guide to hacking the US$200 Pandigital Novel tablet device so it’ll run the Android operating system. Come Christmas time this year, there’ll be dozens of machines just like that kicking around all over the place, only cheaper still.

Speaking of Android, there’s a lot of noise about the way that Google are working on a kind of visual development system that’s designed to let folk with minimal coding knowledge to develop apps that will run on Android – again, a stark comparison to the walled-garden quality control of Apple’s development kits. Sure, the Android market will be flooded with crap and/or dodgy apps as a result… but letting the good stuff bubble to the top is what user rating systems and [editors/curators/gatekeepers] are for, right?