My wife has an iPad. Its completely awesome for our toddler to play games on, and for the wife to check her e-mail, surf the web a little, and see her calendar. Adding events to the calendar on the iPad is annoying, best to do it in iCal on the real computer (though iCal's UI is really weak in my opinion).
I have a 10" ASUS eeePC and its completely awesome for me to do a lot of typing on (also has great battery life), have an Ubuntu environment setup running identical versions of the services that the server runs, and for overall hacking.
They're two completely different things and I think it is disingenuous to directly compare an iPad to other form factors, much as you wouldn't compare your iPhone to your desktop in terms of functionality. Just because two devices have a similar screen size does not mean they are equal!
I have a 10" ASUS eeePC and its completely awesome for me to do a lot of typing on (also has great battery life), have an Ubuntu environment setup running identical versions of the services that the server runs, and for overall hacking.
They're two completely different things and I think it is disingenuous to directly compare an iPad to other form factors, much as you wouldn't compare your iPhone to your desktop in terms of functionality. Just because two devices have a similar screen size does not mean they are equal!