First-order effects

• Tablet PC owners doing serious document work — students, annotators, reviewers — remain stuck without native ink in Acrobat Reader and most mainstream applications, capping how much of the hardware's value they can actually use day to day.
• The wishlist puts direct pressure on application vendors like Adobe, whose PDF reader is the de facto standard for annotation-heavy workflows, to treat pen input as a first-class feature rather than an afterthought.

Second-order effects

• If mainstream apps don't add ink natively, third-party developers fill the vacuum with niche capture and markup utilities — exactly the space the community's own tool-building efforts, like the upcoming Strumento di Cattura, were targeting — fragmenting the experience across small paid add-ons.
• Independent Tablet-focused sites keep building buying guides and workflow tutorials around these gaps, effectively acting as the platform's de facto product management by telling ISVs what users will actually pay for.

Third-order effects

• If the pattern holds, the durable lesson is that stylus hardware only succeeds when the whole software stack — OS APIs, document formats, mainstream readers — is ink-native; fifteen years later, dedicated e-ink devices like the reMarkable 2 would still be praised for writing feel while being criticized for limited capabilities, showing the same trade-off persisting.
• Over time, the wishlist dynamic points toward input methods converging into the platform itself: once touch and pen became standard OS-level concerns rather than per-application features, the 'native ink support' ask stops being a wish and becomes a baseline expectation — which is roughly where mainstream computing landed after the original Tablet PC generation faded.