Why did anyone buy an iPad when they came out? There were no iPad specific apps when it came out, and yet it sold well.
Clearly, Android has a good web browser and email client, and that's enough for many. Just as clearly there are a huge number of non-tablet specific apps that will run fine on the Android tablets, and Android developers are desperately releasing tablet apps as fast as they can to try and take advantage of the "gold rush" when a new platform launches.
I thought there were quite a lot of apps for the iPad at launch, thanks to an early SDK release. At least there was talk of another app-store gold rush, stories of non-US developers flying to the US for the launch day just so that they could immediately check whether their already published app worked on the real device, etc.
There were more than 3,000 tablet specific apps on day 1, and there was no competition.
New platforms don't automatically lead to a gold rush. There hasn't been one for the palm pre.
The argument you are making is that normal consumers will pick a more expensive android tablet with very few apps over an iPad 2 with thousands of apps, some of then mind-blowing on the basis that there will surely be a developer gold-rush.
Even if there is a developer gold-rush, people will still have to wait a year for then software to be written.
I can see enthusiasts doing that by but why on earth would a regular consumer?
Even if you were to ignore the iPad apps that were available from the early SDK release, you'd still be comparing "devices with no platform-specific apps" to "devices with no apps".
Why did anyone buy an iPad when they came out? There were no iPad specific apps when it came out, and yet it sold well.
Clearly, Android has a good web browser and email client, and that's enough for many. Just as clearly there are a huge number of non-tablet specific apps that will run fine on the Android tablets, and Android developers are desperately releasing tablet apps as fast as they can to try and take advantage of the "gold rush" when a new platform launches.