Try to borrow one from a friend and try. I can tell you the 3DS will not satisfy your youtube and browser needs, without a hint of a doubt. It can do Netflix, but it's much slower than an iPad for example, and iPads love netflix, it's a perfect mix.
As for gaming, you have games on the iPad, board games, indy games. But the most important thing I want to tell you is this.
1) You're short on cash, so you shouldn't really buy a dedicated portable if it doesn't fill your most important needs (internet surfing).
2) Making games at times can be 100x more fun than playing games.
However, if you're making tablet games, you absolutely need a computer. You couldn't code iPad apps on an iPad seriously, I don't think there are any Objective C compilers that run on iPads really. But you could research that and see, maybe you could! With a good keyboard dock, you could type your Objective C on your ipad, with some kind of tabbed SDK. But then where will you have irc open? Will you be able to have irc and the SDK open? And the net?
For all purposes, developping content for a tablet is best done with a computer and an iPad. Do you own a computer at all?
Also, I believe there is a creative suite for the iPad if you're really that short and don't own a computer. There may even be an SDK for Objective C as an iPad app. I know the iPad has irc apps, and when you need to use it you just hit the "back" button and jump back to irc, then back to whatever you were doing, so that's okay, but as for the SDK and word processing + art generation, I'm not sure. I know the iPad has sound recording though so that's a plus.
