Two major rumors in the last week have me thinking about ecosystem viability and what it means for tablet PCs in the next year or two. The first rumor was a potential game changer as a video surfaced (via CrackBerry) of a Playbook demo in which an RIM representative can be overheard saying the PlayBook will support Android Apps. It’s not the first rumor of this sort, but it’s the first one to come directly from RIM (even unconfirmed).

The other rumor is that Microsoft’s newest operating system – Windows 8 – won’t be ready for tablet integration until the second half of 2012. With recent rumors pinning the development of Windows 8 around build 3 and a beta likely to be released this summer, the timing seems about right (though possibly a bit earlier in 2012 than some people think). That’s a long time to wait to get into a market that is starting to boom as we speak.

Both rumors (and the reaction of writers to them) point to one thing – the market can only support so many development ecosystems. It’s not so much about the people who buy these devices. If the Apps and hardware are there, people will buy any number of different operating systems.

That’s not the problem. The problem is that when there are too many options, developers tend to shift resources to those platforms that are the most profitable – in this case iOS and Android. RIM seems to be at least contemplating that as they don’t deny rumors of Android support on the Playbook. And while this is a great way to drive sales, it will probably further deflate the Playbook development community. Why would a developer produce two apps – one for Android and one for Playbook – when they could just as easily create only an Android app?

On the other side of the coin, Microsoft is still playing catch up, and unfortunately they are doing it slowly. It’s sad to see a company that was so much at the front end of tablet PC development fall so far behind the curve. By the time they release their first tablet specific OS, if Windows 8 is tablet specific, the iPad will have been on the market for two full years with a third generation device just having launched (if it follows Apple’s normal development cycle).

Android will have had a full year to propagate on new tablets and there will be at least two other major players on the market in the Playbook and HP’s WebOS. If Windows 8 was released right now, it would be a little late to the party. By 2012, the party might be moved somewhere else entirely.

This is a new age of ecosystem sales. People don’t just buy devices – they buy the experience those devices offer. And the more people buy into the iOS and Android experiences, the less likely any of them will shift to a new model, especially developers who make so much money with the current offerings.

I like to use my tablet PC as a replacement for most of the technology I own. That’s not to say I don’t use a PC or mobile phone at all, but in general, if I can get away with using a tablet, I do. So, I am always intrigued when a new player in the remote desktop market arrives and people start talking once more about how useful it is to access your PC on the go.

Specifically, Citrix has finally released their GoToMyPC software for the iPad – something many Citrix subscribers have been waiting for. LogMeIn and Team Viewer have both been available for a while on the iPad and there are a handful of cloud tools to access files and remote file structures, so this isn’t new, but it is interesting.

It comes down to one thing though – should a tablet PC be a fully functional workstation replacement? The question has been asked a lot lately because, frankly, the first few generations of tablets tried very hard to be fully functional. Even modern Windows 7 tablets provide full functionality of a PC with some hardware limitations. It was the iPad that changed all that – paring down what a tablet does to simple, intuitive multi-touch gestures. Android tablets are a little more powerful and have far more latitude for developers, but the same idea remains – it’s not a complete desktop replacement…yet.

Eventually, I envision a tablet PC market that can utterly replace desktops. It happened with notebooks and laptops in the 2000s. Early laptops were heavy, had very poor battery life and couldn’t keep up with even mid-range desktops. That has changed. You can buy laptops today that last for 6+ hours unplugged and provide plenty of power for desktop publishing, graphic design, and even gaming.

So, it will probably not be long before we see a sharp increase in the viability of tablet PCs as notebook and desktop replacements.

But, it goes beyond the power under the hood. You can make a super powerful tablet PC, but if the software and input solutions are not there to provide users with the intuitive interface they need to use something like Photoshop CS5 or Office 2010, it gets tricky. And that’s when people start looking to software solutions like GoToMyPC.

Personally, I think this software is fantastic. It provides a great option for enterprise users especially who don’t want to upload sensitive documents to the cloud where they are vulnerable. It also allows us to access software not yet available on the iPad or Android devices. But, as time passes, we as consumers need to support the idea that the developer community building up around tablets will provide these solutions and finally allow us to use our tablets as full blown workstations.

The time is coming – it’s just a matter of when.