BlackBerry PlayBook free offer

Research-In-Motion has just announced an offer to try to get people to buy their underachieving tablet, the RIM PlayBook. From now until December 31, 2011 if you buy two PlayBooks from one of their authorized VARs you'll get a third one free.In addition, you'll get one "premium accessory" with each Tablet. The Premium Accessories are a leather sleeve, charging pad or 6' HDMI cable.

Here are my thoughts on this offer:
1- It's not enough to get people to go for the RIM product over an iFruit or Android Tablet. HP learned that the only way to get their product sold was to drop the price to $99.
2- Having potential buyers go through approved VARs only sounds like an effort to appease angry resellers who invested in a lot of stock and see it gathering dust in their warehouses.
3- With the recent extended outages of the BlackBerry service and the lawsuits that they are now facing, this offer has the look and feel of an act of desperation. RIM may be in even bigger trouble than we thought.
4- I wish them luck. The industry is always better off when there are lots of players creating new products.