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@MizuInOz
Indeed.
I would suspect that a reasonable amount of the protest is due to Taiwanese workers for Taiwanese companies, seeing their work drifting off to China.

@kripo23
Working standards in factories always rise over time, and the location of the factory drifts to a cheaper location.
It's the way it goes. Britain 'was built' on the industrial revolution, using massive factories for the first time to 'assemble' imported raw goods - and we sucked all the agricultural workers into the factories with higher pay. Then we maybe off-shored some of the processing (no longer imported cotton, but the cloth etc).
Same thing will happen in China. Your electronics used to be made domestically in the West, then maybe to Taiwan and now then onto China.. really just a matter of where next. Africa I'm guessing.
China has currently bet rather big on them being a manufacturer for a while, I think we just need to hope we start to get some Chinese companies producing stuff before this happens so they don't implode.. Guess we'll start seeing a lot more companies like Lenovo and Huawei, some more deals for raw materials in Africa made, and then maybe the factories will once again start their move around the globe.

@JFH Meh - same with all things.
We've been forced to make a choice and cough up a fair pile of cash to do it. We're bound to get as defensive over the phone we chose to put in our pocket, the car we put on out drive and the deity we chose (or didn't) to put over use in the sky.

Hurrah for competition!
Like a few posters, I'm an iPod touch owner and an Android phone user (N1 in my case).
Love both of them - and hate both of them pretty much equally. iPod does what it sets out to quite beautifully. Problem is there's a great big chunk of stuff I want from it that Apple point-blank refuses to support (and actually has the f'in cheek to say I shouldn't want it).
Android on the other hand is a sprawling pile of excitement. Keep on finding new apps, hacks and cyanogen-rolled ROMs that make my little heart beat with excitement on each piece-of-piss re-flash. Unfortunately whilst the frontier is being pushed - the core is somewhat neglected (can I PLEASE have a decent IMAP mail client?).
Anyhoo - as a consumer of both, I can but win, if the two of them decide to slug it out over my affection (and there's space in there for MS if they want)

There's plenty of people telling you about the specs, so I'll leave that to them.
I'd just like to say that Logitech are possibly the nicest company I've ever had to deal with.
1) Bought a keyboard/mouse that mysteriously had bits missing - not Logitech's fault, had been clearly opened in store. Store was out of stock, so I phoned Logitech and they sent me replacement bits without quibble.
2) My Harmony remote's software was playing up. Phoned them up, Indian call center *wept*... Oh hold on, they did answer immediately, actually had more knowledge than I'd managed to google, were quite lovely and provided me immediately with a solution and (brace yourself) called me back the next day to check my problem had been sorted.

Now I'm not for one moment suggesting that I would blindly buy Logitech gear irrespective of what else was out there, but if I ever was in a position where I was choosing between Logitech and something else, I know which way my money would go. For example Shure got dumped for my provider 'in ear speakers' when logitech bought Ultimate Ears.
In fact, I now realize I'm posting a completely unsolicited post about a company who doesn't know me from Adam.. but I just felt compelled to mention they were nice to me, repeatedly.
Sorry, I've even made myself feel a little bit queasy with this paean..

@MosesusedaniPad
Erm... except Android is open-source, so you can compile in (or leave out) bits as you see fit - quite legally.
Have a look at Cyanogen. Surely Apple is the company more likely to be in a position to force things onto your phone you don't want...

@harry20larry

I'm in the UK as well and have seen a few out and about. I work for an IT company though and we've got quite a few in the office.
I only got my N1 after having a play with a hero and a tattoo. Maybe it's because it's an IT office, but I suspect it's because it takes a little while for them to be enough out there for people to get exposure to them and have a play and decide they like them.

e.g. After a few months of my phone lying around the house, my gf asked out of the blue whether she should get the Legend, Desire or N1.
Also got to take into account the contracts people are on. With 18/24 month contracts becoming the norm and most people using a subsidized handset, there's normally a gap once people have decided they want a particular phone until they actually get one.

Dear MS. Could you please just shove everything into the cloud?
Now I know all my saves games take more space than the frankly ridiculously priced memory card I bought for portability can carry, so currently it just hold my profile - but wouldn't it just be nice to log on, have all the stuff I've bought be 'there' and then just download on the fly if it wasn't locally cached already.
I'm not even too bothered about the price of your HDs (mainly as I just bought a 120G WD drive and hacked it onto my Xbox for about £25 all in) - but it does niggle. I'm happy to pay the money for the service, I like it and all that. Just once you've got my money, I would appreciate it if you did everything technically in your power to actually give me everything you're capable of creating.

I bumped into a 'surface' machine in the lobby of a large international mobile operator I happen to be doing some work for. It was just sat there along with the usual corporate dick-waving crud (F1 car bolted to the wall etc).
Just seemed to be running a powerpoint, but then I noticed the 'Microsoft Surface' table stuck on it. OOOh I thought as I gave it a prod to see what would happen.
Absolutely f'all - it was seemingly just running some powerpoint.

I think the flaw in their plan is that they seem to be targeting people with really fast internet connections - and absolutely rubbish machines.
Whilst these might be the 'latest games' they're only running at 720p - and then add in the compression artifacts and latency and.. well really you're not looking at too much to buy a machine that could play the game natively.
As has been mentioned the 'play anywhere' aspect is hampered by the shocking state of wifi in every hotel/airport I get dragged through I'm already having to work out where to balance my laptop so I can squeeze out the contents of my outlook inbox.
'Personally' I'd rather they sold their server software, rather than access to it - need to get the servers closer to the player. Put a dozen boxes in the basement of a Westin and let people in the hotel connect up (via their own corporate laptops) at $10 a day.