Perhaps you’ve heard that the HP TouchPad tablet has suffered an untimely demise? There are a lot of lessons that rival tablet vendors can learn from the death of the TouchPad (and the feeding frenzy it created in its wake). More importantly, though, the loss of the TouchPad creates a prime opportunity for a tablet like the BlackBerry PlayBook.

Watching the demand for the HP TouchPad spike to Black Friday–or even iPad launch day–levels following a dramatic price cut, some believe that the path to tablet glory is paved in pennies. I don’t agree that tablets need to be $ 100 in order to compete with the iPad, but I do think that the TouchPad frenzy illustrates the potential to use a deep discount as a marketing loss leader just to build a base that can fuel app development and sustain the device in the long run.