Around 1950 (sources vary), Raytheon produced their CK703, the first commercially available device. At $18 each ($147 in today's inflated dollars), these simply weren't competitive with vacuum tubes, which typically cost around $0.75 each at the time. Though point-contact transistors were tantalizingly close to an ideal active element, something better was needed.
Shockley had continued his semiconductor work, and in 1948 patented the modern junction transistor. Three years later, Bell Labs demonstrated part number M1752 (photos at http://semiconductormuseum.com/PhotoGallery/PhotoGallery_ M1752.htm), though it was apparently produced only in prototype quantities.
The modern transistor was born. But it didn't immediately revolutionize the electronics industry, which continued its love affair with tubes. It wasn't till 1956 that Japan's ETL Mark 3, probably the first transistorized computer, appeared, but it used 130 point-contact transistors and wasn't a practical, saleable unit. The following year IBM started selling their 608 machine, which used 3,000 germanium transistors. It was the first commercial transistorized computer. The 608 used 90% less power than a comparable machine built using tubes. With a 100 KHz clock, 9 instructions, and 11 msec average multiplication time for two 9-digit BCD numbers, it had 40 words of core memory and weighed 2,400 pounds.
The telephone industry's demand for amplifiers accelerated the development of vacuum tubes, and it unsurprisingly snapped up semiconductor technology. As early as 1952 Bell Telephone installed the first transistorized central office equipment in New Jersey--again, using point contract transistors.
Ma Bell was started by Alexander Graham Bell of course, who started as a teacher of the deaf and who spent much of his career in service to the hearing impaired. So not surprisingly the Bell Corporation waived all patent royalties for the very first transistorized consumer product--a hearing aid, around 1953.
Old-timers probably remember Raytheon's CK-722, one of the first commercial junction transistors. It was available in 1953 for about $7 each, a lot of money in those days. I remember buying bags of random transistors from Radio Shack in the '60s that often had CK-722s, probably factory seconds. I have no memory of the cost, but as this was all allowance money it couldn't have been more than a buck or two for a bag of parts.
By late 1955 the same part cost $0.99. Moore's Law didn't exist, but the inexorable collapse of the prices of electronic components had started, entirely enabled by the new semiconductor technology.
Regency Electronics did produce the first commercial transistor radio (eponymously called the TR-1) as early as 1954. (To see videos of this four-transistor radio being assembled check out http://people.msoe.edu/~reyer/regency/index5.html.) TI, looking for a market for their new transistors, had approached a number of domestic radio manufacturers but was turned down by all but Regency. A contemporary TI press release about the TR-1 calls the components "n-p-n grown junction, germanium triodes." A triode was--and is--a three element vacuum tube.
By the early 1960s, consumers were infatuated with miniature radios (half of the 10 million units sold in 1959 were transistorized). Marketers, then as now anxious to differentiate their products, started using transistor counts to sell product. Although at least one vendor managed to build a radio with just two transistors (schematic here: www.transistor.org/ FAQ/two-transistor.html), and rarely were more than 8 actually used, often as many as 16 were soldered on the board--most, of course, unconnected. That may be analogous to today's GB wars. How many iPod owners come close to filling their 40 GB drives?
