I get how companies have to big up their products, but RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie needs to lay off the crazy juice. As reported by AppleInsider and others, Balsille got a little over-excited and bullish when RIM beat Wall Street expectations with its quarterly earnings call, and, not for the first time, he decided to take a pop at Apple. The iPad was the target, with Balsille claiming RIM’s PlayBook is “way ahead” of Apple’s device. This being the PlayBook that’s not actually out yet, and won’t be out until March, according to Macworld, an entire month before the iPad 2’s likely to show up.

But what, specifically, makes the PlayBook so special? Balsille eludicated in a rant that some poor bastard at Yahoo transcribed in full. Some highlights follow.

I think the PlayBook redefines what a tablet should do.

Fair enough. It’ll be great to have some massive competition for the iPad, to kick Apple’s arse and ensure it continues to innovate. Do tell us exactly how you’re ahead…

I think we’ve articulated some elements of it

You’ve “articulated some elements of it”. Uh, OK. That sounds… positive.

and I think this idea of a proprietary SDK and unnecessary apps—though there’s a huge role for apps—I think is going to shift in the market, and I think it’s going to shift very, very quickly.

Those would be the unnecessary apps that are selling like hot cakes? And the proprietary SDK demanded by devs furious at Steve Jobs when he initially told them to bugger off and make web apps? Uh, OK.

And I think there’s going to be a strong appetite for web fidelity and tool familiarity.

Areas the iPad utterly fails in, what with its excellent web browser and consistent, usable interface, along with increasingly strong support from the likes of Google with web apps designed to work better on the iPad than any other platform.

Now, how do you align or go over the top on carriers and content providers? Well, we have different strategies, and that’s fine, and there may be room for more than one model, who knows.

It’s good that you’ve thought this through. You’re making Steve Jobs’s responses during Apple’s earnings calls look shoddy and ill-prepared by comparison. (Top tip: “Who knows?” doesn’t make for a confident-sounding co-CEO when you use it once. When it’s seemingly your favourite phrase, you need to be locked in a cupboard until you can learn to speak without embarrassing your entire organisation.)

And, you know, it’s a very dynamic market. Plus, there’s enormous growth and shifts happening around the world, you know.

The biggest shifts being from analysts who said the iPad would fail and who are now trying to pretend that they knew from the start it’d be huge, along with people who claimed Android tablets would immediately wipe the floor with the iPad, despite, in the main, not actually being much better than something you’d wipe from your arse.

How many fronts people want to take on contention, that’s a question you can ask. Do you want to go over the top of banks, do you want to go over the top on content, do you want to go over the top on carriers, do you want to go over the top on video content providers? I mean, who knows, you know? What part of it’s good strategy and what part of it’s a bridge too far? I mean, who knows?

And who knows what you’re talking about at this point? I’m pretty sure I don’t. More worryingly, I’m pretty sure you don’t.

There’s a lot of moving parts, but I think we’re just well ahead on the PlayBook, well ahead internationally, and extending very very well.

This being the PlayBook that’s being released in March 2011, remember.

And so, people can have their views on sentiment, but when is it a good entry strategy, and when is it a bridge too far? Who knows? We have turbulent ecosystem right now. How do you work with banks, how do you work with carriers, how do you work with content, how do you work with enterprise ecosystem?

How do you work with a co-CEO who doesn’t know what they’re talking about? Still, RIM’s certainly ahead in terms of babbling, ‘something exciting that might happen in the future, if its own bluster is to be believed’ and in looking at something successful in a market it wants to enter and yelling ‘you’re doing it wrong’ while the competition makes money hand over fist.