Came here to say exactly that. Markets are zombies and dollars are brains. But the title is less thrilling than "Ok everyone knows how to make a tablet now, that won't be a high margin business." In this case margin being the proxy for expertise in putting together a tablet.
But there actually is a story here which VentureBeat came so close too and missed, the cost of compute.
Even in the 80's when I went to work for Intel people 'in the know' thought it was insane that Intel could capture 33% of the value of a PC with just the CPU + chipset. They worked really hard to make that the case, using every gimmick at their disposal, from patents to copyrights to support contracts to outright strong-arm tactics. Even today that survives in the $300 you pay for the CPU on the motherboard. Mostly it was about the software base though, you really couldn't do anyhing about it unless you were willing to bite off on the problem of the software and tools. Apple did that, but nobody else did.
ARM is different, the ARM folks take their tax, but you can buy out their tax if you know you are going to sell enough chips, and the cost to make chips has gone down. Even though the cost to build chip factories has gone up (remarkably so). I'm not nearly as engaged with this problem as I once was but around the turn of the century the 'sunk' costs of doing a chip was on the order of 5 - 7 million dollars. A wafer start (with anywhere from 1 to 12 300mm wafers) is like $48K [1]. Less on the older processes, so may $1 base cost per tested good packaged die. So you if you price to cost + margin there was a huge amount of room below the Intel x86 artificial cost 'floor'. ARM software has gotten better and with Linux and then Android creating volume, additional players entered the market. And some, like All Winning have very modest margin targets on their CPUs, others like BroadCom/TI/QualComm have been playing in the smartphone market where these CPUs don't carry as much margin as general purpose compute devices do. You need look no further than the Raspberry Pi to see what that means in terms of consumer cost.
Anyone can become an ARM cpu vendor, its damn difficult to become an x86 compatible processor vendor. And that is the story we're seeing play out here. From the sidelines I'm watching to see what Intel does next, they are already scrambling (see the Cedar Trail stuff) and they have a lot of smart folks who can do great stuff with manufacturing and architecture. For the first time since the Motorola 68000, they have legitimate competition.
[1] http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/other/display/20110912192619_TS...