I think they may be scared of the Amiga effect. The Amiga was a fabulous productivity and general purpose computer, but died the slow death it did because it was generally seen by consumers as a fancy video game console.
Competitors swept in, played down the "kiddy" game aspect of their systems and played up the productivity aspect and demolished the Amiga in the market place.
Extending a system perceived as a "gaming system" into other tasks has been extremely hard. Despite being decent TV-top web browsers for a while, dedicated gaming consoles have never really found a role outside of gaming for example. At one time, the PS2 had enough peripherals and such for it to turn it into a fully fledged general computing device, but it never took off as such since it's just a game console.
In Japan, theres a similar problem with pre-PC computers like the MSX, PC-88 or the X68000, all great general purpose computer, all viewed as game consoles, all dead dead dead.
(yes there are plenty of other reasons for the death of the Amiga, but the general consumer's view that it was a gaming device definitely played part in that)
That's really not the reason that the Amiga failed. It was more due to lack of compatibility with the leading platforms, tight coupling to broadcast television video standards, and a shocking level of incompetence in Commodore management.
Whenever I think about buying one, this is why it comes to mind. I think it would be fun to play games on.
I really don't see the harm in marketing it as a game console. MS has XBox, Apple has iPad. Seems legitimate to me.
All I use my Galaxy Tab for is games. Except maybe to check a website from time to time.