I have an iPad Air that I bought from Craigslist for $225. The only reason I need a tablet is to have a large viewing area for the streaming video from my quad copter.
Like almost all Apple products, the iPad has proprietary hardware and software that make it incompatible with the rest of the world. That's always driven me nuts with their products in the past, and still does with this. If I want to view the GPS location of my copter, I have to send the SMS from the quad copter to my Blackberry, then email the SMS to the iPad, and open it there in Google Maps. If I had a regular Android phone or tablet, that wouldn't be necessary.
