It’s frustrating being a part-time blogger.

It happens again and again - I get interested in a bit of news, I think to myself “I should write something on that”, I make a few notes, and I plan to get back to it in a day or two when I’m less busy.  Meanwhile, though, the story continues to evolve, and one of two things happen:

• What I intended to write actually pans out (in which case  my remarkably insightful observations come off reading more like “I knew that would happen…” than the pearls of digitalmissive wisdom they could have been)

…or…

• What I intended to write turns out to be exactly wrong (in which case I guess I’m lucky to have not gotten around to writing anything in the first place).

Such is the case with the iPad.

We first reported on the device over a year ago (here) - but since the device has become a reality, we haven’t had the the time to keep up (other than to make a quick observation on how the launch-day twitterati predicted how short-lived the immediate bump in Apple’s stock price would be here).

First, we noticed an interesting competitor from Germany called the “wePad” - wanted to write about that (and compare features), didn’t have the time.

Then we heard about Google’s Eric Schmidt - overheard at a party in LA, the Google CEO promised a Google iPad-killer that would run not Chrome OS (a topic we’ve written about a lot - here, here, and here) but Android.  Again, we wanted to write about that (and how the success of the Apple App Store model drove that decision), didn’t have the time.

Then we heard about Google’s cloud-printing initiative - another building block in Google’s vision of a Chrome OS/thin client/cloud computing future - wanted to write about that, didn’t have the time.

And yesterday comes news of Google’s purchase of stealth start-up Agnilux - a company started by ex-Apple/PA Semi) chip wizards.  This hardware-related acquisition provides pretty conclusive evidence that Google wants in on not only the tablet business, but the embedded (set-top box) business as well - and has forced us to pound out this post in the last few minutes of a morning off, before the car service shows up to take us to the airport.

A Google tablet?   Certainly the refusal by Apple to support Flash on i-anything leaves a gaping hole for a competitor to step in and build a Flash-enabled tablet.  A competitor, like, say, Google.  In fact, Steve Jobs’ resolute and almost personal animosity towards all things Adobe reminds me a bit of Scott McNealy, who while at Sun Microsystems during the 1980’s and 1990’s chose to indulge in a long-lived (and similarly personal) series of tirades against Microsoft rather than keep his eye on the ball and run his own company.  While resulting in a series of amusing anti-Redmond zingers (a list of which appears here), the other result was that Sun, a company with excellent technology was run into the ground before being rescued last year (at a fire-sale valuation) by Oracle. That’s not to say a similar fate awaits Apple, which is on an entirely different corporate trajectory than Sun was at the time (to say the least). Additionally, Adobe and Apple aren’t the head-to-head competitors that Sun and Microsoft were. However, the level of quote-worthy disdain is similar…

OK.  Gotta go.