If you can believe some of those so-called tech pundits, by about now the iPad’s market share would be in steep decline, as more and more competing tablets entered the marketplace. Watching those frequent TV ads for the RIM BlackBerry PlayBook, Motorola Xoom, and even the HP TouchPad might actually lead you to believe that there is indeed a substantial tablet market.

But if you look at those ads carefully, without any means of comparison, you’d wonder what a tablet is good for. If you can believe RIM, it’s for running movie trailers side by side on a 7-inch screen. As far as Motorola and HP are concerned, I’m not at all sure what they are trying to tell you, other than that their products are nice looking and fast.

Once you see any of the ads for the iPad 2, you’d come to believe Apple lives in a totally different reality from all the rest. These TV spots are touchy-feely, quietly demonstrating all the cool things you can accomplish on your iPad. The background music is quiet, subtle, the announcer speaks in a plain voice, rather than shout at you, which is so often done on TV spots these days.

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Just this week, my son told me of a curious episode involving a friend of his who owns an Android OS smartphone. She downloaded an update to the Google Market software, only to have a content filter activated in the process. The result? A 25-year-old woman suddenly had to deal with removing parental controls settings.

Now you’d think this sort of download is as trivial as they come, one that ought to be accomplished in a minute or so without serious side-effects, after which you can get back to your life. But silly bugs aren’t unusual in Android land. What it means is that customers may require far more hand-holding than those who use a BlackBerry or an iPhone.

Indeed, according to a recent survey from a firm that examines customer service encounters, ClickFox, carriers who sell Android phones have to spend lots more money to provide support. The survey canvassed customers in North America, reporting that they spent $46 million more per year to support BlackBerry customers than they did with iPhones. Android OS smartphones, notorious for developer fragmentation and end-user inconsistencies, cost $97 million more per year.

The report is cited in a recent article from Galen Gruman, at InfoWorld, and the results don’t auger well for the support situation in the Android world.

In reporting the amount the carriers are spending to deliver support, it was pointed out that it usually takes a single call to help an iPhone user. BlackBerry users need to have their calls transferred or followed up 37 percent of the time. The figure is 77 percent of the time for Android users.

But this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the tight integration between Apple hardware and software. Even when Macs were much more expensive compared to Windows PCs than they are today, the cost of ownership was almost always less. Users needed less help to deal with problems, and system-related conflicts were far less significant.

Of course, Consumer Reports wouldn’t have a clue about such matters. Their surveys of PC reliability are usually restricted to the hardware, where Apple is at or near the top of the pack, but most companies fall within a narrow range. That’s because a fair amount of the components in these machines are the same, or at least sourced from the same manufacturers. The most significant difference is the operating system.

Understand that the cost of support is not the same as customer preference, or an assessment of how the customer feels about the reliability of their gadgets. If they are accustomed to putting up with more grief on an Android OS device, they are apt to regard the experiences as perfectly normal, in the same way Windows users are accustomed to jumping through more hoops than Mac users to do their thing. Windows users are also far more apt to acquire security software, although there’s an awful lot of money still lost from malware infections on that platform. But that may also be the result of the fact that far too many customers let those security software subscriptions lapse, hence aren’t protected from the latest malware outbreaks.

Unfortunately, such surveys don’t always get the widespread publicity they should. Although Galen’s InfoWorld story was also carried in a sister publication, Macworld, it’s not as if the mainstream media tends to pick up on such things. Certainly CR won’t, because such support matters aren’t on their radar. They will focus more on whether support people solve the problem; they won’t attempt to figure out why the problems remain.

Of course, it’s also fair to say that being more reliable doesn’t mean the iOS is free of problems. Apple has issued regular updates to fix bugs, including serious security leaks. Sometimes it takes a generation or two of updates to address a serious interface problem, such as the poorly-implemented Push Notification feature. You would have thought that Apple’s supremely talented development team should have realized early on that even the Android OS had a better way to address app and system messages, but they didn’t. You would have thought customer complaints would have brought the message home, but evidently they didn’t. Or perhaps other issues rose higher on Apple’s radar, which means you won’t see a flexible Push Notification system until iOS 5 arrives this fall.

At the same time, OS X Lion arrived with some interface peculiarities too. Consider, for example, Full-Screen Apps. It works well enough, until you try to use a second display, which displays that silly linen background. One would think Apple would consider that maybe you’d like a second app displayed on a second display. Personally, I think the Spaces multiple desktop feature, even as revised for Mission Control, remains flaky. Apps appear on the wrong desktop, for example.

I’ve little doubt that some of the worst ills that ail Lion will be fixed after a few maintenance updates, but sometimes you wonder what Apple was thinking when certain features are implemented without thought for the various ways customers will use the product. Using Full-Screen Apps with multiple monitors is just one example, and I’m sure you readers can produce far more.

At the same time, Lion is still easier to use than Windows, and it doesn’t appear that Microsoft will improve things all that much when Windows 8 arrives. That, too, remains a potential customer service issue that ought to get more attention.

So you see someone in his home complaining that his computer is running slow, so his other half urges him to visit an online PC diagnostic site. In a few seconds, he realizes that his computer is infected with malware, and, further, complains that he’s had to restart a few times a week. By the way, this particular service also promises to speed up your PC.

Now I’m sure you realize that such problems are largely the province of the Windows world, as is the malware-removal service in question (one of a number of similar products). Of course, that particular fact isn’t mentioned in that ad. All you know that there is a magic elixir that will, after a few minutes, make any PC run like new. It also assumes that PC users, particularly those at home rather than in offices, routinely suffer from malware infections. How could it be otherwise?

I’m not about to judge the value of that product. It may be a five-star service that will work precisely as advertised. The mere act of removing malware, particularly disposing of spyware apps that clog a PC’s resources, ought to clear out the most serious performance hangups, but that also assumes that the product will clean every vestige of malware. In some cases, a basic scan and removal process won’t work. You have to erase your hard drive, and reinstall everything to get your PC back to normal. That’s something the casual viewer of such ads doesn’t realize.

Now it’s also true that billions of dollars are lost by businesses each and every year as the result of computer virus infections; at least, that’s what Consumer Reports claims. Of course, CR also neglects to mention that this is largely a Windows problem.

Sure, there was a recent Mac malware episode, involving scareware — or fake software promising to fix a non-existent virus infection — which resulted in an unknown number of Mac users paying for worthless user licenses. But that is a singular episode, one that Apple addressed by updating Snow Leopard to protect you from that sort of problem. But don’t forget that the presence of such malware wasn’t the result of any security lapse on a Mac — or a Windows PC for that matter. It’s all about social engineering. You’re fooled into believing that you have a problem that only that one product can fix for you.

But that is the same approach taken in that TV ad. If you want your PC free of malware and running at optimum speed, go online and get that Windows fixer-upper. Of course, it’s not free. After all, they can afford TV ads, which includes hiring a couple of actors to play the husband and wife role. So they have to charge a fair price to cover their costs and deliver a reasonable profit.

Another ad, this one on radio, talks about a repair service that offers to come to your home or office to fix your PC. The reason is, according to the ad, you shouldn’t have to figure out how to disconnect all the peripherals from your PC, lug the computer down to a repair shop, and then reinstall everything after you bring it back. After all, how can you know if your problem isn’t really caused by your monitor, your printer, or another peripheral? Well, I would expect that a few simple phone diagnostics ought to help even the novice user figure out which component might be broken. If not, you can always bring everything over to the service facility.

But the real reason you are offered this in-home service is because they can charge you more money for it. The shop needs to cover the cost of having someone drive to and from your home, and to work in unknown surroundings that may or may not require extra work to diagnose and repair the problem. It’s understandable, and I suppose many of you don’t want to schlep your computer to the shop. On the other hand, most people buy note-books these days, so the number of connected peripherals are probably limited to a printer and perhaps an external hard drive. Besides, what if you need a part that they don’t have on their truck? They may have to return to the shop to get that part, or perhaps take your computer with them, which makes your repair bill that much higher.

The assumption for such promotions is that you aren’t very smart. You are confronted with strange technology that you can barely understand, and thus are willing to pay whatever it costs for someone else figure out what ails your computer.

In contrast, Apple is trying, at least to some extent, to empower you to figure things out for yourself. At the same time, the so-called dumbing down of Lion is clearly an effort to insulate the Mac user as much as possible from the more confusing aspects of the OS. That way you can run your apps without having to have someone hold your hand over every little step. If that’s not enough for you, Apple has established the Genius Bar at their retail stores to provide free expert guidance, and, if need be, repairs under warranty or otherwise. Some AppleCare warranty programs will also provide in-home service; that’s particularly true if you live too far from the nearest Apple Store. And, yes, that’s true of PC makers too.

As to the PC world, since Windows 7 is reportedly pretty decent from a security standpoint, I suspect those scary ads about malware infections are going to have less and less impact in time. These days, the people who have the most problems are those who, for one reason or another, never upgraded from Windows XP, which was malware heaven. And, of course, for failing to install up-to-date security software.

In Apple’s efforts to simplify installing Lion on your Mac, they’ve made things more difficult. First, you have to download a copy, at least for now. Later this month, Apple will release a USB-based installer at $69, a $40 surcharge.

Now I’m not about to attempt to explain why Apple needs to charge more than four times the usual and customary price of a USB thumb drive to load Lion on it. That seems excessive to me, and I’m sure most of you will agree, but I suppose Apple could add some extra features to justify the price. My real concern is the shaky method of restoring your OS should something go wrong, and how the file you download is handled.

As many of you have discovered after installing Lion, the file you may have spent hours retrieving is trashed. Yes, you can make a copy right after getting that download, and place it elsewhere (outside of the Applications folder), so you can be assured it’ll be around should you need it again.

Apple’s alternative, while workable, is far more awkward. You see, the Lion installer places a tiny partition on your hard drive, less than 1GB in size, which stores a simple Lion startup with several functions. You can restore your Mac from a Time Machine backup, restart with Safari as the only app, run a Disk Utility repair scan, and, of course, reinstall Lion. You get there by restarting your Mac, pressing Command-R (for Recovery HD), or holding down Option and selecting that partition.

The last is where things can get dicey. You see, that partition doesn’t contain the full installer. Perhaps Apple wanted to service all those MacBook Air users who have the basic model with a mere 64GB of storage. Three or or four gigabytes reserved for reinstallation might be just a little too much, I suppose, although the alternative may be far more inconvenient.

You see, if you want to reinstall Lion after rebooting in Recovery mode, you are forced to download Lion all over again. I suppose there is some logic behind this move, since it allows you to retrieve the very latest version, which might mean something weeks from now after one or more maintenance updates have been released. That way you don’t have to endure a double installation. At the same time, you may have had to go through some pain to get Lion in the first place if you don’t have a speedy broadband connection. Perhaps you went to a local Wi-Fi hotspot, or traveled to the nearest Apple store, and it may have required a drive taking several hours. Regardless, it makes little sense to have to go through all that agony again. Evidently Apple didn’t consider this, or expects you to buy the USB thumb drive version if you’re bandwidth challenged.

In a curious move, Apple this week released a utility, Lion Recovery Disk Assistant, that does little more than create the same type of partition on an external drive. The process will also erase that drive, another curious choice. It might serve if your Mac’s internal drive needs to be reformatted because of a directory problem. At the same time, the newest Macs, the MacBook Air and Mac mini, do not come with any backup software. If you need to recover your computer’s data, and the hard drive isn’t functional, you have to do an Internet Recovery, a new feature on the latest Macs. This means you’re forced to go online to get all the files you need.

You’d think if you are willing to spend enough money to get a new Mac, Apple would honor that purchase by providing a free USB thumb drive, as they’ve done with the previous MacBook Air. But no. To Apple, we are destined to rely on the cloud to enjoy our digital lifestyles. If cloud access isn’t readily available, you’re out of luck.

Now it’s true that Apple tends to predict market trends. Years ago, they knew that you no longer needed floppy drives to store your files, although it took a few years, and the availability of external drives to reassure customers, to fulfill that vision. Eventually they went away.

These days, Apple has placed optical drives on the endangered list. If you don’t need them, and most of you probably don’t, fine. There’s always an external optical drive, which may be an awkward fit in a laptop case, but at least you won’t be left stranded. But the handwriting is on the wall.

Some day, most everyone will be connected with speedy broadband access wherever they go, without having to pay loads of money for the privilege. But with a quarter of the U.S. population still without broadband, and many around the world facing severe bandwidth limitations, Apple may need to rethink this move.

In the end, though, if only a small number of customers complain about being stranded if a Lion installation, or your hard drive, fails, nothing will change. Or maybe they will make that USB version of Lion more affordable. There are already reports that Apple is offering that option to customers who are otherwise unable to easily restore Lion. That’s a positive first step.