It's ready to go out of the box, bowser. Well, I did have to charge the battery for a couple of hours. And go through some setup screens, though nothing you'd find daunting.

Built-in microphone, stereo speakers (admittedly tinny little things on one 0.4" edge), a 3 megapixel camera on the back that uses the screen as a viewfinder, and a second camera on the front, facing you, that's used for video conferencing and general narcissism. It has bluetooth and I have a bluetooth headset w/mic, which I use when listening to music/videos, and usually when talking on Skype.

Skype automatically uses either the built-in mic/speakers or the bluetooth headset if the latter is connected. It knew about the camera without me telling it, and there's a button to select a video call or an audio-only call. Worked the very first time I tried it. Slicker'n deer guts on a doorknob.

The thing that's fundamentally different about these Android and iOS (Apple) devices is that they're more prepackaged and pre-engineered than we're used to with conventional PCs. You don't fiddle with hardware at all, and your fiddling with software is generally confined to downloading, installing, and running the canned apps. From what I've seen so far, you can expect things to work most of the time.