Printing needs the equivalent of the ipod or flip video camera: something that was redesigned to do the most common stuff really well and is dead simple easy to use
Most printers are simple to use and do the common stuff (printing black text on white paper for non-critical documents) really, really well.
That being said, if you want the iPod experience on a printer, come to a Japanese showroom some time and look for the ones aimed at women. ("You can sell electronics to women?!" -- US tech industry)
Sleek industrial design, appealing bright colors, focused mainly on easy integration with cameras (another consumer electronics item Japan does really well) with every single sample print being "three of the girls having a fun day out" or "the loving family, perfection captured on film".
Printers are not about putting ink on paper. That's just what they do.
They were 5 years ago, but they're hard again for some reason. Not too long ago you could plug a printer into your router, find it on the network from any machine and print to it. No software install. Just find it and print. If you weren't on a network, you could just plug the USB jack into your machine and print just as easily. Remember plug and play?
For some reason, it doesn't work like that anymore. You need to find the CD and install the drivers, and even then chances are you won't be able to connect to it over the network. Even if you have the USB cable plugged into your box, it's not smart enough to pretend it's a memory stick and give you the drivers you need.
In my experience any moving part in a computer (fans, magnetic platter hard disks) will eventually fail, and printers are certainly no exception to this. Like the Office Space fax machine, all printers I've ever had to interact with have got paper jams or problems with paper feeding. I believe the printer at work actually came with a contract with a repairman that would come and do magic with it when it failed, which was often.
An ideal printer would have the minimal amount of moving parts. Currently printing consists of taking a slip of paper and moving it vertically while moving the printing head from left to right. Some companies are researching alternative printers, here's one which has eliminated having to move the printing head: http://silverbrookresearch.com/l-en/technology.html
Now if some company could manage printing entire pages at a time and somehow eliminate having to move the paper very much, things might actually work quickly and without jams.
