I'm not going to send you one of my Newtons! I have only two left!!

Newtons have two huge assets: The awesome handwriting recognition (really, it's almost beyond belief; don't base your opinion on that Doonesbury ****'s cartoons) and an operating system that was designed to be operated by stylus -- and by "designed" I mean that the people who worked on it really thought about how a person was going to apply a stylus on the screen and get things done. It's the little things that tell you someone actually thought about it: Newtons have no drop-down menus, but pop-up buttons on the bottom of the screen, so your hand won't block the screen's view; copy-paste is done by tap-selecting text or other objects (you tap, wait for the funny sound and then draw around the stuff you want selected) and then dragging them to the margin of the screen, where the selection waits for it to be dragged into the page again, a metaphor so simple and natural you don't even have to get used to it.

Mind you, Newtons were by no means perfect: The screen is rather hard to read; the OS setup (as a giant database rather than a file system) means that connectivity is spartan at best -- and non-existent whenever you want to export anything a bit complicated; Internet was a glint in the distant future for Newtons and still is (a really bad TCP/IP stack is mainly fault to that). And there's a few more things.

But in all, NewtonOS is by far the best tablet OS ever made, mainly because it was actually made for a tablet.