I think the tablet market is going to grow and expand.
However I think it's going to grow mostly independently of the home PC market. They may likely take the place of many situations where a laptop might have been purchased. We're going to see many households with a home PC, and tablet(s) for mobile computing or kids.

Irrelevant. More people buy smartphones than computers too. This is not proof that they are replacing computers. In a family of four, you might have a tablet for each child, yet still have a desktop/laptop for each adult.
Second, PCs have plateaued. Both in performance and longevity. The newest models on the market are no longer so much faster than the one I bought three years ago, that I must upgrade it to run the newest software. Sales have dropped because we're keeping our PCs longer than before. We're not getting rid of them for tablets. Tablets are just the newest toy fad to play with.

Yes, that's exactly the kind of use a tablet is great for! Walking around, tapping buttons on the screen, saving data back to the server.
The back end system then notifies the kitchen of orders to make, the billing system of pending sales, etc, etc. Perfect place to use an iPad or Android tablet. There's a few customized restaurant client-server apps out there for exactly this kind of setup. Brilliant idea I think.
At Ford, we have a group of engineers who all have iPads. They use them strictly for either web browsing or remote desktop clients while running around the manufacturing floor. It's handy for them to be able to remote into their PCs from anywhere--but they still have to have that PC to remote into.

Very good points. Measuring total PCs in service would be a much better indicator than sales.

Tablets are evolving at a rapid rate. Tasks that need a computer now may be easier on a tablet in the near future. Also, what about families that have never owned a PC? That's a lot of people around the world. Once they get their smartphones, I think that many of those families will buy tablets, and it may be a long time afterwards that a PC shows up, if it ever does.

I think the larger the company, the more persistant computers will be compared to tablets. As tablets mature, perhaps the desktop PCs could become part of a server farm, leaving only a keyboard and large screen for the tablet to plug into. That's pie in the sky right now, but as tablets get better things could change.

[/QUOTE]Businesses are not going to dump an office-full of PCs for little tablets that are easily stolen or broken, and nobody can type on faster than 20 wpm.[/QUOTE]

Um, I am a three finger typist and I can type well over 20wpm..

What do you do with the other seven?