I think that's a little far fetched.

While I don’t doubt that it will evolve into a meaningful product, I don’t really see the “point” of the iPad at this point in its life. Part of this may be that the wireless internet is very expensive locally, but I think that the larger problem is that the iPad seems to be much more suited to work on than an iPhone (or iPod touch) but the kind of work I do doesn’t translate well to this kind of device.

They haven't included Flash support, right? So until every site starts having an iPad-friendly HTML5 version, browsing won't be the same (the NY Times already does, but that's not the norm and it's therefor a pretty skewed site to show off on).

As someone pointed out, for college you often have to install specific software, so the iPad won't work there.
The video support is also pretty limited I'd guess (aside from me watching a lot of anime fansubs, for which the iPad probably won't have the codec), I find it pretty disturbing that I have to pay for The Colbert's Reports on the apple store but it's free to watch on the official colbertnation website.

Apple are really good at making streamlined and intuitive products, but when it comes to your usage options, you have to want to do exactly what they offer you.

At last we have a thread from Mafoo that isn´t about politics.

Why the iPad is a horrible idea. It's $500 right there. It does a lot of things, but it doesn't do any single thing well. In fact you can get components that do something specific much better than an iPad for cheaper than the iPad itself. If the device was around $150-$200 then it would be worth something, but as it stands it does absolutely nothing well and costs more than things that do so.

Edit: SPeaking of which though, the first company to put out a mobile digital notepad that all it does it let you write on it, will become absolutely rich if priced correctly.

The ipad serves as both a E reader and as well as a Netbook. I did like the color screen for diagrams. However, I am not crazy about using the device to read during long trips. So I have not picked one up yet, I may change my mind later

Never have I laughed so much at a video due to bias.

When he was comparing the note taking facilities I was in stiches. He claimed that netbooks had notoriously bad keyboards, yet didn't care to go into any more detail (I have never had a problem with a netbook keyboard, yes it's a little small, but they are reliable and not much smaller than the iPad's virtual keyboard).

He then tried note taking on his iPad, when the screen decided to randomly flip orientation a couple of times. He then placed it on the desk and said you can type on it and it works just like a regular PC. Does he use his PC flat on the surface of his desk? It looked extremely unnatural and akward, no-one will want to type like that. There is a reason PC and laptop monitors are stood upright.

And then he just nonchalantly claimed that the iPad was better at note taking, even though it was clearly much worse.

*sigh* Apple fanboys...

I'm glad I'm not the only one who found that part absolutely hilarious.

256MB RAM is totally awesome, too. We'll never need more than 64K to begin with.

Well the point is I can do many of those same things on a Netbook and much more.

I can't argue that the iPad is a fancier toy and may be idle for simple things like watching a movie, reading a e-book, or visiting websites that aren't crippled from lack of Flash support. But the Netbook has far more capabilities, can be used to get work done, and is much cheaper.