A new touch-screen tablet PC with Windows 7 from Archos, a newcomer to the category

yes, A lot of people are betting that 2010 will be the year of the tablet computer.

Of course, we’ve heard such predictions about tablets before. This time, the reasoning goes, is different, because the devices will have more sophisticated touch screens and consumers are more used to virtual keyboards. Most importantly, Apple just might be jumping into the fray.

Tablets, you may recall, are either laptops with a screen that twists and folds flat and uses a stylus or fingertip for input, or something more like an oversize iPod Touch that’s used for tasks like checking e-mail, getting on the Web, and watching videos.

True, market researchers at Display Search predict sales for all touch-screen devices will be growing from $3.5 billion this year to more than $6 billion by 2012. But if 2010 is going be the year of the tablet–meaning regular folks start buying these en masse–someone has to get it right.

So far, we’re still waiting.

Toshiba, Archos, Fujitsu, and Lenovo have touch-screen tablets coming our way in the next few months, none of which should revolutionize our already established expectations of tablet PCs.

That hasn’t stopped people like Toshiba executive Marco Perino from declaring that “home multimedia tablets will be one of the fastest-growing products in the consumer electronics space.” Fujitsu’s Troy Nakamura said it’s the right time for tablets this time around because “people (are) using touch in their daily lives with smartphones, airport kiosks, ATMs…we’re becoming more conditioned to use hands and fingers on certain machines. The tablet fits nicely into that.”

But do we really need yet another mobile form factor for accessing the Web and watching videos? The hottest computing category at the moment is Netbooks, which grew 40 percent during the second quarter of this year compared with the same quarter a year earlier. That’s almost twice as fast as the rate of traditional notebooks, which grew 22 percent.

As these more traditional types of mobile computers continue to fly off the shelves, it begs the question: Why do we need tablets?

An Apple touch-screen tablet–discussed ad nausem by the tech press, including at CNET–may or may not appear at the beginning of early 2010. CEO Steve Jobs himself is said to be overseeing the project, but there’s no concrete evidence it actually exists.

Apple does have an established reputation of thinking thoroughly through any prospective market and coming up with a product that ties hardware and software together in a simple way that often becomes a personal fashion statement, as with the iPhone and iPod.