The iPad is a great tool for consuming information, but not so good at communications or creation. A month in, I've never heard of anyone doing serious work on an iPad despite Apple's efforts to shoehorn a full office suite into the thing.
However, people love it despite the limitations. The iPad's a device that's just plain fun, and that counts for a whole heck of a lot. Apple will probably sell millions of them, and it looks like they have a good shot at creating an enduring category.
Have gaming interfaces appeared yet? It would be easy to undercut lots of "gaming keyboards." Especially since one has no manufacturing and shipping costs.
I agree with the point - the iPad makes a great input/interface device..
Within the first hour, my wife was entering birthdays in the calendar and I said that I thought the iPad would prove poor at creating information, but great at consuming it (browsing, reading, watching, etc). Nice to see that early thought validated somewhat by your comment.
I've also seen a few pro-bloggers claiming to produce entire posts on the iPad, but whether they've kept it up or not is a different story.. :-) (It would drive me nuts!)
Part of learning from decisions, for me, involves attempting to rationalize them. If I have a hard time rationalizing something, I might avoid deciding in favor of something that sounds similar in the future.
It's a fancy way of talking. I enjoyed it, but I can see why it's not the most effective way of getting a point across to a large number of people.
Do you have an iPad?
I don't really care whether you want one or not. But it's really sad that you can't recognize that the set of things that are worth $x to you is not the same as the set of things that are worth $x to others, and have to instead make better-than-thou proclamations about a reality distortion field.
My car is better than yours, my editor is better than yours, my favorite trilogy is better than yours, and your favorite band sucks.
Get a fucking life.
o Multi Tasking (Switching between
email, irc, IM, web, Terminal -
don't even try to do all at once.
o Long Form Typing
o Terminal Sessions
o Sunlit Use
o Games (Field Runners, PinBall, MirrorsEdge, PvZ)
o In Person Social (Photos, Web Pages, Games
when hanging out)
o Video (I watch all my TV through iTunes on my iPad)
o WSJ - Guaranteed - 45 minutes a day. Awesome App.
o Good Reader (for PDFs)
o Kindle - though not as much as I thought I would.
o Email/Calendar - though not that much
better than my iPhone.
o Time Magazine. (First time I've read Time in 4+ Years, now I read it weekly)
o Marvel (I'm addicted)
Can't wait to see what Applications are built over the next year.
I then stream it to the iPad with Air Video. Probably the most kick-ass app I've seen in awhile. TV shows are almost all XviD or X.264 and Air Video converts them live on your machine and streams them over WiFi to your iPad (both local and remote).
Beyond that, it can't be beat for checking e-mail and the Web just before going to sleep/after waking up, in the bathroom, or while sitting on the couch.
I've also started to read a lot more. I haven't had any weight issues with it at all, but I have a 9 month old baby so I'm used to holding a ton of weight in awkward positions for ages.. :-)
Try using Popplet as a mind mapper. This has the potential to subsume the entire functionality portrayed in the Microsoft Courier ad.
I doubt I'd stick with something like that, though. I want to write notes, scribble things, underline things, draw circles and lines around stuff, etc.. not type. So a sketching type app always works better for me.
You look at Android or Windows or Linux by contrast, and when it's difficult to do something, it's because their design teams are much weaker than Apple's. Sure, the iPad doesn't have to do everything. But if you approach a netbook or a non-Apple tablet with the same "It's an Apple, so it must be good" mentality, is the iPad really worth the price premium?
While you might be better off with a MacBook Air if you find yourself using iPad + keyboard a lot, it's still about $1000 cheaper to get the iPad.
iPod in 2010: touch screen, 199, 16gb, and makes calls/high speed Internet
It will get there.
Take a look at the music applications available. TouchOSC is revelatory. It doesn't make music. It's a meta-tool. It lets you construct your own controls for musical instruments. (Actually, other devices can use Open Sound Controller signals as well.)
My computer is almost exclusively emacs or maybe Illustrator/Photoshop.
In this sort of setup, the iPad shines for me.