I was watching a 30 min preso online about a month or so ago. It was by a young professor geared towards cloud computing geeks, Twitter, etc. It was actually pretty engaging, considering the "I will grant you 30 seconds of my time" mentality that YouTube and friends have managed to culture into me.
The vast majority of the preso had nothing to do with the iPad, but he did make a brief mention of it and of the utility of things in general, and in particular whether it could fit in your pocket. He specifically mentioned the Swiss Army knife, drawing the analogy that since the Swiss Army knife was a clever idea, having a larger version of it that you can lay on your kitchen countertop (or cram into an adequately sized drawer) where you can "flip out" a spatula, knife, ladle, etc, doesn't make it more clever than the pocket-sized tool.
That was one of those "things that make you go 'hhhmmm'" moments, at least for me.
Somewhat orthogonal, I read some blog somewhere where the author pointed out that technological convergence didn't eliminate the need/desire for a dedicated desktop calculator. In his case, he means something which sits on his desk's surface, and not the computer metaphor. What's more, his calculator uses paper tape.
And I could see that as well. I'll use my cell phone's tip calculator (I'm lazy) or in a pinch, the built-in calculator, although I'll admit it's a bear to use. If I'm on my Mac, either I'll use the calculator applet, or I'll fire up Python in a Terminal window and go that route. I personally can't see the benefit to having the paper tape, probably because I could see myself surrounded by the li'l devils and not knowing what context each belongs to (plus there's the whole requirement of having to buy yet another supply); if I need something with more oomph, there's always spreadsheets and printers.
As for the iPad itself, we'll see. If I had $500 burning a hole in my pocket, I can think of various other things I'd rather be tinkering with, like FreeNAS or OpenFiler.
