I totally disagree, 'cause you completely miss the point about the device.
It is NOT a, please forgive me, nerd-computer. It is the computer "for the rest of us", as Steve would say.
I like the analogy of the evolution in the car industry. Remember the time where cars used to run on wooden wheels and the driver exactly needed to know, how the engine worked, how to tune his car (no, not pimping the car, it was about how to improve the engine, etc.). If you asked a driver at that time, how the next generation of car should look like, they'd answer: stronger, faster and more chrome....
But then car manufacturers started to learn the requirements from the market. It was not about horsepower, speed and so on. People wanted a car for housewifes, for shopping, for the family or workhorses....
And modern cars need to fit our requirements, not we are going to adopt to the cars capabilities. And a modern driver doesn't need to know, how the engine works, what the difference is between a .dll and a .pdf or .exe
The iPad is a device which doesn't want to be a full scale computer, it is multimedia, entertainment and definitely for coach potatoes. It is a new idea of computer. It is progress and evolution.
It is not about gigahertz, RAM-size, resolution oder interfaces. It is the question if you still want to drive an old-timer or a modern car.
Go on the market and ask 10 people "what is an USB-port". Maybe three people know the answer. Ask for the amount of ram in their computer and possibly one or two know it. If you ask for a SSD you have to have a lot of luck....
But what is with these other people? People not like us (the technology geeks, the early adopters).
They are annoyed with their computer day in and day out, because they - the same user, who doesn't know what an USB-Port is - get asked by their virus scanner, if the file "winlogon.dll" in the directory SYSTEM32 should be deleted or just moved into the quarantine folder.....and to be honest, Macs are easier, but not less difficult, cause we, the users always tend to go deeper in the operating system, than we should.
Apple is actually revolutionizing the computer industry with the iPad. They own more than 70% of the music-download market, they sold more than 75 million iPhones and iPod-Touches over the last three years. And they will revive the dying print industry the same way, as they revived the music industry.
Steve Jobs has well recognized, that Apple never can compete with Microsoft and Linux-distributions in the professional and commercial markets (except a few creative areas, for print, video, etc.). That's why Apple is focussing on the home and private market. And they do that very well.
And btw. there has just been a research on the TCO (total cost of ownership: purchase price, maintenance, energy consumption, IT help desk, etc.) of computers over the whole lifetime in an enterprise - and guess what, Mac's are, although they are slightly more expensive when you purchase them, at the end of there (tax) lifespan cheaper than the Windows-PCs.
Ask yourself: Would you give your grandmother a notebook to scroll through the latest family pictures? I have shown my granny some pictures on the iPhone. And after a few minutes she was flipping through the pictures easily. And now imagine granny with an iPad......
You get the idea.
Apple's iPad, unlike the MacBook Air, will take the home market by storm. Even if only 10% of all existing iPhone/iPod-Touch users buy one, it is still 7,500,000 devices.....
That is a market force no print company will deny and I predict here and now, that I am able to get 70% of todays available print magazines on the Apple iTunes Bookstore within the next 24 months.
And they will take other markets at ease: Hospitals, schools, museums - you name it.
The iPad is just the beginning........
....and for those, who still want to use Linux or Unix or Windows......there are still enough other pc's, slate devices, pocket-pcs etc. out there. And yes, they do have there reason to survive and they will keep a strong market share.....but the iPad will displace a lot of them, the more it evolves, the more market share Apple will get.
Just my 2 cts.