Of course, we might all be wrong. Apple may be announcing that it's getting out of the hardware business and going into the business of breeding teacup poodles, for example (but only really teacup poodles). That I would pay to see.

Still, there's a big difference between this day's magical announcement and the one last year that heralded the second coming of the computer age (aka, the Year of the Tablet). This time out, the iPad has a serious competitor: the .

Amazingly and against all odds, I managed to get my mitts on one of these suckers yesterday. (The PR folks clearly mistook me for someone more important who also wears a hat.) And it's ... nice: responsive, decent battery life, pleasingly whizzy Honeycomb interface, the usual Android yadda yadda. It's also heavier than I expected, a bit glarey in the screen area, and at $600 with a two-year data plan more than I'd normally want to pay for a toy. But it is absolutely a serious competitor to the iPad, which means Apple is no longer "redefining computing," it's now competing on price and features like the rest of the rabble.

Aside from that? Meh. It's a tablet PC, one in a series of 3,427 . Cool? Absolutely. Life changing? Not so much.

Don't get me wrong. Tablet PCs are what PCs have aspired to be all along: Turn one on, and it comes on -- no torturous three-minute boot sequence. You can install software (most of it free or dirt cheap) by literally touching a button -- no clicking Next a dozen times to accept the default settings and then rebooting. They're always connected to the WebberNets and small enough to take almost anywhere; the battery is good enough that you don't have to lug a power brick and go hunting for an unoccupied AC outlet after two hours. They play music, take pictures, let you make video phone calls, and do a decent job of displaying what we used to call "print publications." These are all good things.