Well, OK–to be fair, we don’t know for sure. Steve Jobs definitely wants us to think they’ll be more than that. And would it really be out of character?

The thing I’ve always found fascinating about Apple’s branding is how much effort they put into making things shiny. Their strict policy of vertical integration–producing both hardware and software–allows them to deliver a perfectly seamless and visually consistent user experience, something their competitors are incapable of replicating. Not only that, they’ve shown themselves to be great innovators time and time again, creating software that not only feels fresh and new every time, it has a quality of magical allure to it that draws in geeks and non-geeks alike. And yes, “magical” really is the best word I can come up with for it–Steve Jobs has all the qualities of the eccentric visionary, and I suspect he’ll likely be remembered in the future as the Edison of personal computing.

In the case of the iPhone and the iPod, what Apple’s competitors repeatedly noticed was that they couldn’t out-Apple Apple. Try as they might, they never could get the publicity or the attention that always followed Apple’s venerable name. No matter how cutting-edge their products were, they couldn’t make them sexy. The iPhone, after all, was the first smartphone that captured the public’s attention and wasn’t written off as too expensive/too businesslike for “normal people” to be seen with, despite its relatively limited feature set at the time of its release. All it needed was a pretty touchscreen, a sleek design and interface, a rather subpar sound system and the Apple touch.

What I find interesting now is that there’s been a glut of tablet news lately. (Yes, that last link is to an article about very shaky rumors of a Google-branded tablet.) These companies know the Apple tablet is coming. They’re trying to steal Apple’s thunder by showing that what they’re doing isn’t all that special–others are doing it too. They don’t want the tablet space to suddenly be dominated by whatever Apple’s releasing. But will it work? Obviously this depends on how well Apple can maintain their freshness image, and the press attention they get for it–when it does come, it’ll be the denouement of literally half a decade of speculation, so clearly they’ll make at least some people happy regardless.

What I wonder is: can any other company ever manage to capture the shine that Apple represents? Google certainly has a bit of it, but they’ve yet to be seriously tested in the hardware marketplace, and the Nexus One is hardly a groundbreaker (despite its luminary status as a Google phone, and the fact that Google deliberately made its bootloader unlockable!). Microsoft certainly doesn’t have it–their entire corporate image just exudes mundane. So who can?