Re: "they're not just picking numbers wildly out of the air"
Yes they are. That's why we have a global recession on. The Stock Markets are full of people who read horoscopes, rearrange their furniture to increase their wealth, or believe in cosmic ordering.
I suspect it went more like this:
A) they're gloming their hopes onto any stock that seems to be selling well, because (now they don't have portfolios of tumbledown houses in poverty-districts of America to sell to each other) they no longer know what anything is worth
B) they all own iPads themselves
C) everyone they know owns iPads
D) they extrapolated that forwards to a set of false assumptions
So the IT industry constantly underestimates how big the sale are, while The Street constantly over estimates the figures. Both sides get the numbers wrong, but claim 'they we're told', when in actual fact they didn't bother looking. They didn't bother looking because, either way, they'd prefer to believe the story the want to be true, rather than find out the truth.
On the bright side, betting on Apple stock does appears to be a sounder move, than how they used to fill their days, and the numbers weren't actually all that wrong. What seemed wrong, was the market reaction, but what did it tell us? The markets are full of irrational people who don't understand where money comes from. Well, we knew that already.
Apple's stock is treated like bullion, these days, anyway: just because the bullion value takes a sudden knock means relatively little to the people who actually use gold to make stuff - or even the people who make a living out of guarding big concrete rooms full of gold bars.