Allentown is much more about the "show", Pinburgh is almost exclusively a tournament---the games are all PAPA's, there's no vendors, no buying and selling games.

I would tend to agree that there is remarkably low amounts of pinball-playing-talk on pinside---very little talk of technique, very little strategy talk, and so on. I don't know if that represents a true cross-section of the pinball community, though. I'd certainly love to chat more about how to attack various games for points or how to learn various playing techniques, but it seems to be hard to get those threads moving on here