That doesn't mean that Apple's choice is right and yours is wrong (or vise versa) just that they are different choices.
Anyway - I think at the very least Apple could shove off power consumption elsewhere in the next round of updates and give us more RAM if that's what it takes.
You are suggesting that the configuration that is best for you is best for everyone and therefore is the best for Apple. But that isn't necessarily true. I don't doubt that it would be the best for you -- that is what you want. But don't assume that your preference is best for everyone or for Apple itself.
It is the nature of tradeoffs that you can't satisfy everyone 100% with a single configuration or even several configurations.
You think that additional memory is the better tradeoff. OK, some quick googling shows 1GB of DDR3 memory might be about $10 wholesale (I found $16 retail). So if you are going to sell 70 million tablets (that is the number of iPads sold in the past year), going from 1Gb to 2Gb is roughly a $700 million decision (per/year) and that assumes stable memory prices (they aren't) so your decision might cost more than that (or less). And you've now cut into your power budget for all future products.
As a user I don't have to care what Apple has to do to get the RAM up - renegotiate with their vendors, improve battery life, sell a different SKU with more RAM and $16 more in price, eat up the cost as a price to pay for user experience etc. You kept explaining why they couldn't do it when others have been there and done that.
Frankly even viewed 100% from Apple's standpoint, none of your arguments are very convincing, especially so if you look at what actually is involved in 1GB of additional RAM and when even lower priced devices have it.
