Lenovo has made some tremendous gains over the past few years. The Chinese hardware giant is the third biggest player in the worldwide consumer market, and is the largest manufacturer of notebooks on the planet. These light-weight, affordable laptops add up to a very big market that Lenovo is not neglecting, even as it steps up its mobile strategy.

The company introduced three new Windows-powered Ideatab tablets today, the S2110, A2107, and A2109 priced. The S2110 is a $399 ‘premium entertainment tablet’ that comes with a 10 inch screen which offers a 178-degree viewing angle, and is less than 10 millimeters thick; it’s coupled by the A2017, that’s designed for less CPU-intensive uses such as reading and web browsing. No word on how much the latter is going to cost, but it will probably be going for less than its more sophisticated cousin.

The 300 dollar A2109 coupled the best of both tablets – a high-definition screen, a reasonably fast Nvidia processor and an even more reasonable price tag – in one gaming platform that’s guaranteed to run Angry Birds smoothly.

Notebooks are still very much a huge aspect of Lenovo’s strategy. The new IdeaPad S300, S400, and S405 are similar to the AS209 in that they are an attempt to combine the best of two worlds: the 14-inch devices are more portable than your standard notebook, and run better at the same time.

Surprisingly, the demand for tablet computers hasn’t put too much hurt on notebooks. Users are looking for more mobile solutions but the wind is flowing in the opposite direction of PCs more than anything, and Lenovo has already set sail.

At VMworld this week Michael Dell, who’s company is also making a move into the tablet market ahead of the release of Windows 8, said he’s banking on virtualization  to maintain  the status of the desktop computer in the enterprise. PCs still account for a huge chunk of Dell’s revenue, as well as HP’s – but their market share in this space far from being all that Lenovo is gunning for. A recently announced alliance with EMC has gotten analysts worried about the long-term implications for the two rivaling vendors’ data center businesses.