You prove the answers do not influence the purchase decision.

These seem like important decision points for a product management team to fret over while Steve ties their hands behind their backs (note his strenuous objection to a stylus or Newton-like gestures … old biases die hard with Mr Jobs.)

At $499, it’s something just about any and every Apple devotee will rationalize into their backpack along with their MacBook and it’s charging cable and dock and paraphernalia. I think we see the demise of portable video players as well as the decline of in-car video systems — the parents and the kids alike will prefer the iPad.

Roll on AAPL $300! : )

How much discretionary income to you have? It darn well better do a lot more than that to warrant a $500 price tag to me. Especially for just a big-ol ipod touch.

An iPod app on the iPad is still an iPod app, running on an iPod-sized window in the middle of the iPad (or pixel-doubled so it almost fills the iPad’s screen).

The more interesting question is which apps’ publishers will choose to do the extra work to make their iPod apps into iPad apps. At this point an Apple approval process *is* required, but I think it would be difficult for Apple to say “accepted for the iPod, rejected for the iPad” on anything other than technical grounds.

Though I have found it very handy as a video device, I can’t take it seriously as an ebook reader. The thing does display PDF’s natively, so why not? The battery life suffers due to the need to backlight a 7″ screen and spin a hard drive.

The iPad suffers the same backlighting problem but avoids the spindle motor. But even the maximum available 64GB of main storage is paltry for a personal video device (even the 705′s 160GB is constraining in my experience). So we have a device with mediocre battery for an ebook reader and mediocre storage for video, but passably acceptable for both. That sounds to me very much like…drumroll…a netbook. Only this one is sleeker in its design, though not fundamentally more functional, and costs twice as much: it is a boutique netbook. If we accept that netbooks are mostly used as highly portable second computers that are intended only for light workloads, but not a subsitute for a “real” computer, then how much market will there be boutique variation that costs as much as a “real” laptop?

After all, a business case can be made for an iPhone or other smartphone. Substituting silicon for petroleum is a common thread. Gadgets pay for themselves if they reduce fuel consumption:

–Cellphones when monthly plans dropped into the $30′s: (“Should I get a gallon of milk on the way home?” And so on.)
–Wi-fi hotspots instead of driving to the office.
–Smartphones when they became capable enough to obviate trips to the office.
–Home broadband when it dropped below $75/mo and made informal telecommuting possible.
–GPS units when the price dropped below $200.
–A Kindle when an extra checked bag full of reference books costs $50 or more.
–Netflix and Tivo vs. Blockbuster

Often the business case is delusional about how much a gadget is used for real work rather than useless play, but the argument is, at its core, reasonable. However, it is hard for me to see the iPad being perceived as anything other than a luxury item until it either improves enough to truly replace a TiVo or a Kindle, or its price drops to $300.

If yo have to hold it one-handed by the edge, do your fingers cover part of the screen? Seems to me the design guys should have tempered their love of sleekness with some sort of thought to the types of ridges or swells that designers of larger cameras or even tv remote controls use, even if it was only a rubberized piece that was removable. I’ve also thought some sort of picture frame-like integrated ‘kick stand’ could have been nice. 3rd parties wil take care of these but they won’t be as nice as if they’d been designed in, the way that the various ipod/iphone gloves etc often interfere with docks.

@Rick Lee: The “Get Books” button in the iPhone Kindle app does not let you buy books in-app, the way iBooks apparently will. It launches the Safari browser and takes you to a mobile-friendly version of Amazon’s Web-based Kindle store.

Some iPads do not have 3G (or 2G). Does that give you another clue?

You can use an online tracker, like zoolert to keep tabs on it :
http://www.zoolert.com/apple-ipad-in-stock-tracker/