It really comes down to how you spend your leisure time. The early adopters of television were those who were interested in spending their leisure time tuning a television so that the rest of the family could watch programming. The early adopters of computers were those who were interested in spending their leisure time coding a program so that they could demonstrate its tricks. That's why the Aibo failed - there just aren't that many nerds walking the earth who would rather program a dog than play fetch with a dog.

iPods were not better MP3 players than the rest of the market. They were more expensive, they didn't play a lot of files, they had limited battery life, they had no removable media. But they had a UI that anybody could figure out. Same with iPhones. Same with iPads. i-anything is basically someone else's product stripped down to the bare essentials and made useful for people who hate tech. This is why the original Apple TV was loved by nerds and hated by everyone else - it was a castrated Mac Mini running a slimmed version of OS X. The new Apple TV, on the other hand, is loved by everyone else and hated by nerds - the shit you can't do with that thing is offensive. But you take it out of the box and it works.