A friend of mine pointed out that Woot was running a special today on the Gateway M275 Tablet PC – for $599. In my humble opinion, this isn’t much of a bargain. I’d probably buy one at $199, but at $599 I’d just as soon put an additional $400 into it for a truly better Tablet PC experience.

You’d be better off spending $400 more ($999 total) for a basic Gateway CX210S – better processor, better power consumption, better RAM modules, slightly better screen resolution, likely faster hard drive, twice as much disk space, and it’s Vista Capable (Vista Ready with a memory upgrade to 1GB, whereas the M275 isn’t even listed as Vista Capable).

If you have $599 to spend on a Tablet PC, you have $999 – and at $999, your experience with the Tablet PC is going to be far better (from everything I’ve heard – not ever having owned one). Understand that Windows Vista is going to bring with it a lot of tablet-specific hooks. If a machine isn’t even Vista Capable today, I wouldn’t spend more than a couple hundred on it.

Intel’s Core 2 Duo processors changed “everything” – and I can’t wait to have one in my next laptop.

Woot Isn’t Always Worth a w00t