The latest rumors of the hour suggest that that Hewlett-Packard's tablet PC will make its U.S. debut in June and retail for $545 or thereabouts. That's coming from a Spanish Website called Clipset (the machine-translated article can be found here, in all its "it has more connections and bellboys, by lateral" glory), and should thus be taken with a heaping tablespoon of salt. Clipset also asserts that the tablet with feature USB and an integrated camera.

After months of iPad rumors and "reports" that turned out to be incorrect (my favorites, in retrospect, are the ones that insisted Apple's device would retail for $2,000 and feature a 12-inch screen), I'm disinclined to trust a lot of the tablet-related scuttlebutt circulating out there; nonetheless, the product parameters suggested by Clipset open an interesting avenue of discussion: if the majority of iPad models and their Windows-based competitors are priced within roughly the same $450-$650 range, then it'll draw into sharper focus a lot of the battle lines that have been slowly consolidating over the past few weeks; to wit, would you be willing to purchase a device that lacks Adobe Flash, USB or other features? Does having either Windows 7 or an Apple-centric OS make a difference in a typical person's purchasing decision?

Apple has gambled before on excluding hardware--I'm thinking of the iMac G3, which shucked the diskette drive in favor of USB slots and a recordable CD drive--and won. They're doing it again with the iPad by limiting the I/O to a dock connector.

Hewlett-Packard, for its part, has already attempted to highlight a competitive differentiator by having its executives point out that its upcoming tablet PC will run Adobe Flash. As the device gets closer to its release date, I suspect that the company will begin highlighting any peripherals--such as a Webcam or USB ports--that it thinks may sway customers to its side. If that $545 proves true (that's converting from Clipset's 400 Euros) then it's probably unlikely that HP and Microsoft will market it via a lower-price play.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, back in January, there was a lot of hubbub surrounding the tablet PC space. Whether it was Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer showing off three tablets (including HP's) onstage during his keynote presentation, or PR reps showing off touch-screen laptops that folded into a tablet-style form-factor, every manufacturer seemed to have a prototype and an opinion. Then Apple unveiled the iPad a few weeks later, and a lot of that fervent activity seemed to cool--now HP seems to be attracting buzz as the primary short-term competitor to Steve Jobs' latest wonder-toy.

But at this point I doubt that HP will sell as many units on preorder as Apple, if only because HP doesn't seem to have the same sort of enthusiastic fan-base. If Microsoft really wants to make an impact re: Windows 7 and tablets, then it probably needs to consider working with a hardware manufacturer to create something more radical, which helps redefine the category. They could do worse as a starting point than the Courier concept.