Gustin’s points and my quick rebuttals:

1. The first version of any Apple product will be outdated soon. Yes, but any version of any Apple product will be outdated soon. That’s not a great reason not to buy any particular product.

2. You don’t need a giant thousand-dollar smartphone. You don’t need a $200 or $600 smartphone either. But it might make your life better enough to be worth the money. And if the iPhone is any precedent, Apple’s tablet computer will be far more than a smartphone.

3. You’re just going to break it, anyway. Yes, all of my gadgets have a few scratches and dings. That’s life. They still work. I’ve even seen iPhones with shattered screens that still work. If we were all so afraid of breaking things, we’d live in padded rooms.

4. Multifunction devices can do a lot — just not well. That’s just silly. One word: iPhone.

5. Buy one, and you might as well wear a “Rob Me!” sign. Perhaps, but this is no more true for a tablet computer than for a MacBook or other laptop, and that doesn’t stop people from using their laptops on the subway or at Starbucks.

6. The tablet never caught on — and there’s a reason for that. Yes, I went into some of those reasons in my “Tablet Fever” piece. The point is that Apple, with the iPhone, made a very good start at addressing the problems, and the slate device is likely to represent a larger-scale implementation of the solutions.

7. No keyboard, no mouse, no dice. Hey, if you prefer a keyboard, you can always stick with your laptop (or keep triple-typing on your phone). My bet is that the Apple tablet will have multiple input methods (virtual keyboard, voice, and possibly handwriting recognition) that, together, will work well enough to substitute for a physical keyboard. And within 10 years people will wonder why they ever were so fixated on physical keyboards.

8. Netbooks are cheaper. If you want a netbook. To me they seem like dinky, dumbed-down Windows PCs.

9. Something better’s coming. Something better is always coming.

10. Beware — Apple also built the world’s most infamous paperweight. One word: Newton. Oh, good grief. When are people going to stop pointing to the Newton? For one thing, the Newton was actually amazingly cool in its day—calling it a paperweight is grossly unfair. How else could it have inspired the Palm Pilot and a whole generation of other portable devices? And if Apple hadn’t learned a few lessons from the Newton’s ultimate failure, I don’t think they’d be where they are today with the iPhone.

Then again, I might just be a victim of wishful thinking — we’ll see later today.

What makes being Slashdotted a special joy, though, is that the Slashdot community is notoriously questioning, critical, and sometimes even a little biting. So when you find out you’ve been Slashdotted, you’re simultaneously praising the gods of cyberspace and bracing for an onslaught of snark.

If a visitor from Slashdot doesn’t like the look, feel, or style of your site or your article, they won’t hesitate to let you know. One Xconomy article that got Slashdotted a while back was a multi-page piece, and all of the comments from Slashdot visitors were complaints about how annoying it was to have to hit “next page” three or four times to read the whole piece. Today, the very first comment on my Apple article from a Slashdot visitor—in fact, the comment that tipped me off that we’d been Slashdotted—focused on an (admittedly gratuitous) neologism in the first paragraph (the word was “mediasphere”) and on how amateurish the column logo looks. (I know that, but in my defense, the goofiness is partly intentional. And I’m planning on finding someone to design a better logo.)

So far the Slashdot entry about my piece has generated 526 comments on Slashdot, compared to about 20 comments on Xconomy itself. Sometimes I wish readers would stick with Xconomy’s own comment section to talk about our pieces. But on the other hand, a lot of the discussion over at Slashdot boils down to vituperative name-calling—as is the case with most online discussions involving Apple or Microsoft (not just those at Slashdot)—so it’s probably best kept within Slashdot’s walls.

I laughed at David Pogue’s lines today, in a blog post about reader response to his review of the Google Nexus One phone: “Veteran tech columnists know one thing very well indeed: If you write anything positive about an Apple product or negative about a Microsoft product, you get buried by hate mail and personal attacks. The only worse result is if you say something negative about an Apple product or positive about a Microsoft product, in which case you get exposed to the true ugliness of the human spirit (and sometimes, in fact, physical threats).” All true—and I guess I feel like I escaped today relatively unscathed.