Market research firm Forrester predicts that Apple will dominate the European tablet market, despite strong competition.

[ad#Google Adsense 300×250 in story]Forrester estimates that Apple has 70 percent market share for tablet sell-through to consumers in Europe. This is an important number, because sell-through indicates the number actually in consumers’ hands. By comparison, Forrester says that other tablet makers have product in retail channels, but it’s not moving nearly as briskly as Apple’s iPad.

Apple competitor Samsung suffered a setback earlier this week when Apple won a preliminary injunction preventing the company from selling its Galaxy Tab 10.1 in most European countries. But that’s not the only problem facing other companies. Forrester cites issues like fragmentation, high prices and lack of content or channel strategy as issues facing Apple’s competitors.

For Apple, there’s a real challenge in reaching European consumers outside of the UK, said Forrester. Within the UK, Apple has 30 retail stores; the company has 22 more throughout continental Europe. (That compares to almost 240 in the United States alone.)

“Apple’s brand and channel presence is not uniformly strong in Europe; Mac ownership, for example, is lower in every EU-7 country than it is in the US,” wrote Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps.

What sort of market are we talking about, though? Forrester predicts that Europe, the Middle East and Africa (known as EMEA) will account for about 30 percent of the worldwide sales of consumer tablets in 2011 – about 14.5 million units all told. Forrester indicates that more than 43 million more Europeans say they’re interested in buying one in the future. So it’s a sizable market for Apple and other players.