It is tolerated in consoles because the walled-garden model of subsidized launch hardware is the only one that makes modern gaming consoles viable. Without it you get the old boom-bust economics of the atari/Intellivision era or the 3DO as a reward for a billion dollar investment. Or you get the APEX PGC.
With both consoles and the Kindle eink readers, consumers seem to grasp (better than critics, actually) what it is they are buying.
And what they are buying is *not* a piece of hardware, but rather access to content and functionality.
The question o FIRE isn't how much of a compuer you're getting out of your $199 but rather how much *use* you get out of it and whether that use justifies the buy.
Thaat is the same qesstion console buyers are facing these days, now that Sony has stopped billing the PS3 as an entertainment computer that might cure cancer and removed support for alternate OSes and uses. When you buy a PS3 you're buying a BluRay player that also plays games, rents/sells videos, lets you access Hulu, Netflix, and many other of thec same services as FIRE. Few if any non-hacker consumers ever really bought the PS3 as a computer and I expect few FIRE buyers will go in expecting to do word processing or image editing on a FIRE even though, yes, you could do it.
Android app capabilities on FIRE is a bonus, not *the* reason to buy.
You get a FIRE if you want to watch videos, read magazines, surf the next, and play casual games.
Again, I suggest that Playstation VITA and Nintendo 3DS are more likely cross-shops for FIRE than a TRANSORMER Prime or a chromebook, regardless of what the plumbing inside may look like. Ater all, Kindles run on Linux but nobody cross-shops them with servers.
Me, I doubt I'll pick up a FIRE any time soon, but that's because my needs are more in line with what the Win8 Tablets will bring not because I want FIRE to be something it isn't.
I just don't have a need for it right now.
But I do think there are a whole *lot* of people who will appreciate FIRE fr what it is and get full value out of it.