Fragmentation of an industry/hobby makes for weird times for customers/users. Specifically it induces a generational divide between users.
Right now, 'tablet computer' (in the public's eye) means 'iPad.' That'll be true for a few more years, because no other tech company can control quality and cost like Apple, and that's not going to change without mind-bogglingly large flows of cash money. In a few years, though, when a single competently-made viable alternative to the iPad exists, users won't just face a 'which do I buy?' choice, they'll face a conceptual shift. Right now (unless you're looking at netbooks, which pretty much no one is) you don't even really need to think about the iPad's features - either you want that basic kind of device or not. In five years you'll need to break down the iPad into its components, affordances, specific features, which produces a wave of weird feeling. It strips the magic from the device. The 'cool' is gone.
Folks hate to lose their store-bought cool.
For 30 years, 'roleplaying game' basically meant Dungeons & Dragons. It didn't matter what that game was good or bad at - either you wanted to sit down and tell stories over dice rolls, or not. Sure, other (better) games existed, but until Vampire came out in the 90's, no one entered the hobby just to play those games, and those numbers were never ever big anyway.
Now there are better, reasonably well-publicized alternatives to D&D. (If you like stories, you should be playing Fiasco or Baron Munchausen or Mouse Guard.) The ongoing identity crisis starts here: for the first time in the hobby's history, gamers/buyers need to think hard about what, exactly, a game like D&D actually does. The answer turns out to be: 'not what we thought.' Its shoddy genre-emulation has given way to a strange involution of playstyle and narrative focus - since the millennium, D&D has been solely about D&D - and the whole idea that RPGs emulate genres has changed the way gamers think about the experience of play.
This matters way, way, way less than the iPad question, but it helps to illustrate the shift that cultural objects/formations take - in D&D's case, from 'that thing teenage boys do with dice' to 'that one heroic-fantasy game.' There's no longer anything ineffable about it in the public's eye.
What's lost is religious content.
