I am a little confused as to what the difference is regarding trading the tape and technical analysis. Are they two different types of trading or is one a subset of the other. My view of tape trading is a more simple and direct approach to trading by looking broadly at supply and demand for individual stocks/sectors and basically trading off the momentum of the money flows, and that technical analysis is more complex, even sometimes over complicated in analyzing trends or data which have nothing more to do then simple liquidity demands.
Reading the tape is just looking at the bid ask and price values without the use of any visuals like charts. It is a form of technical analysis.
Not really. There are products like MarketDelta that can be a big help. I've developed my own software to do similar and also analyse the book graphically - see the ACV and Bolter's MarketDelta thread. Chart vendors could do much better in this area.