frustrations with tablet pc makers

I'd love to have a tablet iBook, but so does the rest of the world, apparently. Also look here and here. Anyway, as you may have gathered, I don't really like Windows, and prefer to double-boot with Linux. In fact, the last couple of days I have been renegotiating with myself whether I shouldn't really ditch Windows completely.

Slates appeal to me because I could get more display for the same weight (thank/curse Apple for showing the world how much nicer a large display is!), and I've recently converted back to doing things on paper and blackboard in any case, so it fits with my general line of thinking.

Now, my current laptop has a 40GB hard drive. If I were to upgrade, it would have to be to something bigger. Unfortunately, most slates (tablet PCs without inbuilt keyboard and touchpad/other mouse device) seem to be a bit short on hard drive and even more seriously, memory (256MB? you'd almost have to run Linux). More crucially, the makers don't understand that any slate needs at least 3 USB ports: one for keyboard, one for mouse, and one for some other device that you may be trying to operate and which needs mouse and keyboard. Okay, they didn't think of Linux, and I haven't tried Linux on a slate, so I don't know if a mouse wouldn't really by superfluous. If anyone in the Edinburgh area would like to volunteer their slate for a test run, I'll let it be worth a few beers.