The whole world is going nuts about the Fire, which looks like it will be a huge success, and rightly so. But notice the two things they had to do to make it happen:
1) Massively undercut the iPad on price.
2) Adopt an Apple-style infrastructure with its own media store and app store and fork the base OS away from Android.
Google did neither of these things themselves, though they certainly had the money to do the first (and probably to buy into the second). But Amazon comes to the table with a compelling value proposition for “this is why you need a tablet” and a price point that will let people think “maybe I do…”