I bought one and it's finally a worthy Android device to my iOS devices. However, there is one tragic flaw with it--the tablet apps are of a terribly varying quality. Only a tiny tiny handful are tightly programmed with the device's screen size and other considerations in mind. No apps are as tightly polished as the good ones deliberately targeted for iPad. Most tablet apps on Android were automatically resized with no thought and it shows--they're ugly as hell.
There's yet to be a real standard-bearer for Android tablets (the Transformer was close, but Asus alone didn't have the name recognition to push it) before the N7; so I'd expect the quality of tablet apps to start shaping up finally. ICS being on a respectable number of devices should help as well (since 3.0 was a "breaking" release).
IMHO, with the exception of games[0] and such, Android handles phone-tablet scaling much better than iOS does: the UI properly fills the screen, text isn't pixelated, and you aren't forced into a phone-size keyboard that doesn't even reach the screen edge.
[0] games are typically very specific wrt resolution, this isn't a tablet problem as much as an Android problem thanks to the wide variance in screen aspects.
“Android handles phone-tablet scaling much better than iOS does: the UI properly fills the screen, text isn't pixelated, and you aren't forced into a phone-size keyboard that doesn't even reach the screen edge.”
iOS has none of the problems you mentioned, so what exactly makes Android better than iOS in that regard?
The point is that there's less of a need for a separate tablet version of many Android apps than there is for iPhone/iPad since Android's scaling is much more sophisticated.
iPad versions of apps aren't simply about scaling the UI. Take Twitter on Android tablets[0] for example, it's clear that merely enlarging the UI elements doesn't automatically result in an awesome UI on tablets.
Similarly, an UI design that works great on a phone (like with gestures from the side) might feel awkward on tablets.
Even with games, if you use vector graphics and the aspect ratio is close-ish it can work pretty damn well. I tried out the phone version of Angry Birds on a Transformer at some point and if it weren't for the extra button on the bar allowing me to choose scaling modes I couldn't have known this wasn't targeted for tablets.
I highly recommend reading thru the user reviews, a good selection also, as rating is not everything. But it's half the fun finding that gem of an application that has the same mindset as yourself and you like. Just be mindful what permisions some applicaiton require, but enjoy.
Both iOS and Android have a bell curve in terms of quality of application, but Android's apps, like Windows, tend to be on average much lower quality.
Part of this is the laisez-faire attitude of developers towards design and completeness, and part of this is making applications that work properly on the myriad of Android devices is very hard.
iPhone apps on iPad are obviously that. People may complain about being entitled to a single version that works versus buying two but even the Universal iOS apps have an entirely separate iPad UI/version usually. This is just being lazy just to say that your app "works on tablets."
Ah, so the baseline is in fact better than iPhone apps on iOS, but a further separate purchase that provides a further increase in tablet-ness isn't always available (yet), I guess that's more in line with what I would have expected.
