Whatever number of customers use a browser to browse the Internet using their iPad - they would benefit from the RAM increase. Besides it's not known how much exactly another GB would cost in terms of lost minutes of battery. Probably nothing to sweat about.
But I will defend your right to defend Apple at any cost - known or unknown ;)
I got the tradeoff part when you mentioned it the first time - it's just that I am saying more RAM is worth the tradeoff of whatever unknown amount of possibly minuscule loss of battery life. And I don't say this without a reason - several times a day I get annoyed by background audio / airplay getting killed and my browser tabs getting reloaded. So it's not without a valid reason.
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.
I don't think you get the 'tradeoff' part. At least I don't seem to be clearly communicating my thoughts on the matter.
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.
It was confusing to me that you were thinking from the corporation's viewpoint! That makes it way more complicated than necessary. a) Apple constantly toots their horn about putting user experience ahead of anything else. b) Apple has lot of money. c) There are lot of products on the market - phones, tablets that sell for both premium and no-profit, that have 2GB RAM. d) Apple sells the iPad at premium price points e) I am certainly not the only one that would benefit from more RAM. I bet lot of people will benefit from having more memory for their "post PC" device.
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.
And yet Apple didn't put in the extra memory. I hope you don't think my quick comments here are any sort of serious analysis of the tradeoffs but you should assume that perhaps Apple itself has done that analysis and ended up with a configuration that is different from your expectations for perfectly defensible reasons (from their point of view).
I never said that Apple couldn't put in the extra memory -- I just suggested that there were tradeoffs that suggest why they might not have made that choice. I was trying to add information to the discussion but you seem to want to insist on proving your preference is the right one and that Apple made a mistake (as in the wrong decision for Apple and its customers -- even ones who don't have the same needs as yourself).
Note, I'm not trying to prove that Apple made the right choice -- perhaps it was the wrong one and they could have sold more iPads and had happier customers if they added more memory if they had followed your advice. Maybe they wanted to but couldn't line up sufficient supplies or maybe there wasn't space for the extra memory or maybe they didn't want to eat into their profit margin or …
But I will defend your right to defend Apple at any cost - known or unknown ;)