But I believe the Xoom is the first real shot in the tablet wars. For most users, the iPad’s advantages won’t be that critical, and it wouldn’t take much for Google and Motorola to fix most of the gaps in the OS and in the native apps.

These guys want a battle sooo badly. They’d be easier to take seriously if they didn’t hail the one true iPad competitor every three months, only to have it fizzle. It started with the HP Slate before the iPad came out. Maybe the Xoom is it! Fifteenth time’s the charm!

Read the reviews and you’ll find that while this thing is an improvement over other Android tablets, it still has a a number of decent caveats. Not the least of which are the and the price. Will it do better than its predecessors? Probably. But in order for the Xoom to really make sense as a purchase, consumers still need to decide that they absolutely have to have feature X that the iPad 1 doesn’t have (and which they might not even be able to use if they have it), price and supporting ecosystem be damned. And that’s even before we know what the iPad 2 will offer.

In the world of tablets there continues to be two categories: “iPad” and “not iPad.”