For months now we’ve been talking about overpriced Android tablets and the failure of Google and ARMdroid vendors to come up with competitive products that can deliver good value for money and stand toe to toe with Apple.

Sadly, it seems we were spot on. According to Register’s Paul Kunert, non-Apple tablets are piling up in warehouses and very few people are choosing to pick one up, despite the hype. Of course, high prices might have something to do with the fact that retailers are moving Android tablets like tired snails returning from a funeral. Recent price cuts don’t seem to be helping, either.

According to channel analyst Context, non-Apple tablet sales were slow across the board, in all parts of Europe, regardless of the OS. HP managed to move about 15,000 TouchPads in Europe last month, while Acer and Asus managed to ship just 8,000 and 7,000 tablets. Apple apparently managed to sell about 160,000 iPads in the same timeframe. To make matters worse, shipments in the first week of August actually slowed down.

Context’s Salman Chaudhry claims that only the iPad is selling well, while inventories of all other tablets are piling up.

"There is a mountain of surplus tablets in the channel," one distributor told the Reg. "They are just not shifting."

So for all the hype from vendors, Google and ARM chipmakers, it appears that Apple really doesn’t have much to worry about. The advent of 28nm chips, quad-core ARMs, new Android variants and possibly Windows 8 could start to turn things around sometime next year, but only if Apple by some chance manages to gamble away its lead. Judging by past experience, it won’t.