Not just tablets. Any consumer product. With the exception of embedded products where Linux is well hidden from view (Android falls into that category).

I also sometimes wonder about that. I do not pretend to have the answer but I have a few ideas. Mayme it's a combination of factors, maybe something completely different.

Here are my 2c:

• Fragmentation. There is one Windows, one Mac OS, one iOS, one Android... you get the idea. They all have version variants but they are still one entity. OTOH, there is no such thing as Linux, when you think about it. There are at least 20 of them, usually mutually incompatible. That is not a good start.
• Lack of support. I know, I know. You are going to burn me alive for saying that. Community support and all that jazz. But that is exactly the problem. Community support is getting better but until recently, the answer to everything was, "recompile the kernel". Which brings me to...
• No single entity to turn to and no liability. When you have a problem with your Mac, you go to Apple. When you have a problem with your Linux tablet, you go to... err... where? The community mentioned above?
• Lack of consumer oriented applications. There are a lot of great applications for Linux. All of them written by geeks for geeks. All kinds of servers, for example. Or utilities. But no groupware. No good video editor. (There are about 10. I tried them all and they all suck.) Heck, there is not even a good IDE for programming in C. You are expected to use VI, like we are stuck in 1970s. There is an Office suite but it is light years behind MS Office and is fragmented (see point 1).
• No marketing. With no one to make money on it, no one is going to try very hard to sell it. Which means no hype. It may be fantastic but it will not sell itself.

There are other issues too but even the short list above is enough to conclude what I think the real problem is. For a product to become successful, it has to be, well, a product. A product has someone standing behind it. Someone making it for profit. Linux is not a product. So trying to sell a Linux tablet will inevitably fail.

The solution? Do not sell a Linux tablet. Sell a tablet. In the worst case, sell a Linux tablet. Do not put the emphasis on the OS. Make it so that the OS does not matter. Focus on the user, not the boring technical stuff.

I always cheer up when I see a new Linux-based consumer product. 5-8 years ago it was netbooks. Today we still have Chromebooks. And the approach was/is about right. Do not try to impress the user telling him it runs Linux. It Does Not Matter. Sell it as a device that can do X, Y and Z.

Does Jolla's tablet fill me with the same level of excitement? Yes and no. Yes, it is yet another attempt at a Linux based consumer product. No because there is too much emphasis on the "Linux" part. Which is kind of hard to avoid when the company's main focus is the OS. Does it have a chance? No. Not the Jolla tablet. Once the IGG units are all delivered, that's it. No more Jolla tablets. But there may be a future for Sailfish. It has a potential. It just has to be picked up by someone who is willing to embed it into their product and sell that product. Two years ago I thought the Jolla phone was such a product. It flopped because there was too much emphasis on the Sailfish part and not enough on the phone part. Sailfish may have a chance if Jolla finds a partner who will reverse that. And then stand well back and not try to get in the way.