In the years to come, will HP's TouchPad be viewed as little more than a short and – for early adopters at least - sharp experiment?

If nothing else, its quick demise has proved one thing: the overriding importance of the ecosystem behind a platform, rather than the relative specs of the hardware itself.

TouchPad wasn't found wanting when compared to iPad 2 on the stats front.

The two devices sport identical screens, similar processor grunt and – in my view, at least – TouchPad's design, both in terms of the hardware's form factor and the intuitive nature of the tablet's UI, actually offers advantages over the market leader.

Yet, it's taken prices falling through the floor in response to TouchPad's demise for interest in the tablet to surge. A sub-£100 price for some models at retailers has resulted in stock being depleted in a matter of minutes in many cases.

Clearly, consumers always had some sort of interest in the hardware - in one survey it was in second place - but when you survey opinion on social networks such as Twitter, the main reason they held off picking one up originally was the relative weakness of the webOS ecosystem when compared to that of iOS.

The real price point

If they were going to invest £400+ in a tablet, people argued, they'd be more likely to pick the one with access to hundreds of thousands of apps.

As alluring as webOS is to those who have experienced it, the fact HP decided to offer TouchPad at exactly the same price points as iPad 2 immediately drew unfavourable comparisons.

Motorola, too, has found Xoom a tricky sell, largely thanks to the fact that it's the most expensive tablet on the market.

The ability to tap into Android's more widely supported ecosystem means it's unlikely to find itself abandoned in the same manner as TouchPad (indeed, Motorola's new owner Google is likely to have substantial plans for the company's tablet output), but any chance of challenging iPad at the top of the tree seems remote.

The reason why iPad is able to command a monopoly-sized market share despite an increasing number of competitors is no great mystery: the combination of the App Store and iTunes locks consumers in.

Until rival ecosystems are able to offer a similar level of support (and even Google's Music Beta will struggle to match Apple's platform in terms of strength and depth), there's only one area where iPad rivals can offer consumers any form of advantage: price.

The big pull out

Earlier this month, it appeared HP was well aware that such a strategy was its only realistic course of action. After what can only have been sluggish sales, a $100 price cut in the US appeared to deliver the desired results.

At the time, HP senior VP Stephen DiFranco commented that the firm had been "pleased with customer response" to the price cuts, and that they allowed TouchPad to be "even more price-competitive in the marketplace."

Indeed, there was little sign a wholesale drop of the device was likely, given a 7-inch TouchPad – dubbed TouchPad Go – was unofficially unearthed at the same time.

What makes HP's decision to pull out of the market even more surprising is the fact executives at the company spent much of their time pre-release talking about 'co-existing' with iPad, rather than making any foolish attempt to take it down.

"It would be ignorant for us to say that we are going to take it [the market] away from Apple," said HP's worldwide developer veep Richard Kerris in July.

"We think there's a better opportunity for us to go after the enterprise space and those consumers that use PCs. This market is in its infancy and there is plenty of room for both of us to grow."

A month and a half later, however, and HP threw in the towel, with those at the top of the company deciding they weren't willing to take the financial hit required to buy TouchPad the kind of market share required to make money in the long term.

How low can you go?

The problem for the rest of the industry is, HP was one of the few players in the tablet market that seemed to get the user experience and had a comparatively stable road map for the growth of its webOS business.

It soon found out that the strength of its hardware alone was not enough to carve a space for itself in the market, and price was its only bargaining chip.

Fellow tablet manufacturers will now have to decide just how low they're willing to go in order to gain a foothold in a market that is increasingly looking like Apple's to lose.

TouchPad may well prove to be an extreme example of what can happen for those unwilling to budge, but the lessons it serves up act as an important caveat for manufacturers caught up in the rush to market.