Supposing I've bought the actual book made of paper, which I enjoy owning, I don't have any remorses of pirating my own book

Strange device.. almost makes the overpriced Nokia netbook look like a sensible product.

I would buy this, over the IPAD anyday (has everything I wish the ipad has, camera, stylus, multitouch):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3e5bgj7Ofs

Boooring, it's just a bigger ipod touch.

Board games on the iPad must be alot of fun!

Why would I buy this at this price instead of say a Asus EEEPC at $299?
The only thing it can do better is read books, and it is not like it has an e-ink screen, so its form factor is only slightly better.

The size that it is at should make it capable of using flash among other things. This is a giant media device, and why any one would use this over a laptop baffles my mind.
If you could use a stylus and it had a more accurate screen I could see it being used more professionally, but right now their is absolutely no practical use. It is a $400 toy.
On my Eee PC running linux I can do what ever I want, essentially everything a full laptop can do, just a bit slower. This device is silly, personally im waiting for something like the touchbook to be more powerful and cheaper.
Its forgivable for a phone to not have flash, but this device is not a phone, its a computer.
I ask one more time why would I pay $400 for this when I could get a netbook, that can do much more, for $300?

@bobthebuilder - you're missing it. The point isn't that the iPad does more than anything, the point is that it does what it does, for the use(r)-types that could use it better than a netbook could because its not a device with the same compromises (its got different compromises).

Many people make the mistake thinking that this device is supposed to replace something computational - its meant to augment current uses with something more or less natural. If you will, its an appliance, and the web is the utility behind it. Like other PC paradigms before, this iteration of tablets is just taking computing forward.

It's about their market. By constraining multi-tasking to the built-in apps (unless you jailbreak), this is forcing you to use the built-in media player rather than streaming music like Pandora, last.fm, or Spotify. Since you're using their music player, the music has to come from somewere. Either you've ripped it from your own CDROMs OR *you've bought it from them because it's easy.*

The same holds for video, only more so, as getting things ripped into iPod format is still tricky and the conversion process into iPod/iPhone tuned video formats takes time.

Part of me is thinking that the video portion is solely behind their push, and formerly inclusion, of h.264 into Quicktime and how they got YouTube to support their decision. Google, Apple & Microsoft all support in one way or the other - licenses, fees, et al - the patented h.264 format.

And if you start to read around, it seems like Safari plugins - Apple's way of saying Flash - is the culprit of a lot of their failures and crashes according to Steve Jobs and company.

Apple likes to control each and every part of their OS, some sourced from opensource, some not - but they truly seem to want lord over their OS's on their products to a point of nigh-control freak nature. But, if that is how they think they will avoid the multitude of problems associated with externally developed and maintained code - be it open source or not - it makes me wonder highly about their ecosystem and how I fit in that.

As far as the Apple OS X (desktop) ecosystem goes, I'm fine with that. But with products like this that claim to be the ultimate in one thing, but don't offer me everything as I use it, even scaled down for a mobile platform, it starts to disappoint.

Worse problem is though... their marketing fills the "gaps" with words that a lot of consumers tend to eat up. I - and I know I'll draw some heat for this - just wished that opensource had each and every gap that does exist (in a consumers mind, not mine... I need no convincing) in one platform is comfortably answered and easily utilized on their platform.

So far, only Ubuntu does this convincingly. Nokia doesn't... not quite yet. And spouting out a bunch of esoteric commandlines to the masses only confuses them - the world has largley, and unfortunately, moved to wizards... bleh.

Apple's move(s) as of late seem more ego-driven than anything, imho.

but there is really nothing worth $500 dollars that it does better than a netbook. Personally I think it is the worst mistake apple has made in years, though they are really good at marketing so it might still succeed.