I'm one of those folks that has a cheap 8" android tablet from a company I'd never heard of before I bought it ... mine was $85. Case added another $6 to the price. I've had it a year, and not seeing the need to replace it. I initially bought it because I needed something I could do Wordpress updates for research on the road, and couldn't easily bring my laptop, nor did I want to try typing stuff up from my phone.
Research on cheap android tablets takes a while, I admit, so you have to have time to look into who's got what, and know how you'd use the tablet, and what features are important, and which you can sacrifice on. Mine, I knew I was sacrificing on speed. But I don't play shoot-em-up games, so I don't need the speed someone who plays fancy games does. I knew screen resolution was important, as well as expandability, so I found one that went toe-to-toe with the iPad mini's screen resolution, and which had a micro SD slot. Oh, and the sound sucks on my tablet unless you use headphones. I think it took me a month to discover that.
Do my friends tease me? Yes. Just like they tease me that there's no swirl on my trainers. Oh well. I bought the tablet to do things, and it does them.
I used to be a loyal Apple fan, and still like their products, but I bought two lemons in a row from them -- my last MacBook Air was in the shop more than with me, and only lasted a month past AppleCare. Apple makes buying easy, by giving you a system guaranteed to do whatever you want. I frankly don't need something that high end. I know what I do with my tablet, and I need one that does that, and which meets the specs I need.
I suspect one of the reasons people aren't replacing tablets as fast as other devices is that tablets are our second devices. We use them for reading the newspaper larger than on our phones, or reading books and watching movies, playing games. But those are things we don't need constant upgrades to do, for the most part.
Oh, and when I emailed the company about getting a second power cord, to have a spare at the office: I got a personal email back an hour later, telling me it was $10 over Paypal. Nice.
