Are consumers more likely to buy a tablet than a PC this year? According to Apple’s Steve Jobs and recent Gartner research, the answer is undoubtedly yes.

At the launch of the Ipad 2 Steve Jobs carefully mused that the post-PC era was upon us. His calculated sayings, according to Cnet will be enough to sow some doubt in some consumers’ minds whether to choose a tablet over a second PC. However, he was carefully not to say anything about the Mac as the new MacBook Pros just hit the market last week.

Market research firm, Gartner also released data that predicts the fall of the PC in front of the tablet, and that tablets were not “additive” but “subtractive” meaning that consumers will be more likely to forgo a second PC and opt for tablet instead of adding a tablet to another PC.

“We expect growing consumer enthusiasm for mobile PC alternatives, such as the iPad and other media tablets, to dramatically slow home mobile PC sales, especially in mature markets,” George Shiffler, research director at Gartner, said in a research note  relayed by Cnet.. “We once thought that mobile PC growth would continue to be sustained by consumers buying second and third mobile PCs as personal devices. However, we now believe that consumers are not only likely to forgo additional mobile PC buys but are also likely to extend the lifetimes of the mobile PCs they retain as they adopt media tablets and other mobile PC alternatives as their primary mobile device.” Overall the research firm expects “home mobile PCs to average less than 10 percent annual growth in mature markets from 2011 through 2015.”

Some of the reasons that Gartner provides for this preference is that tablets are more adapted to the current social networking era with a longer battery life, connection possibilities to 3G and 4G networks, and are much lighter and more portable, reports Cnet.