And I can’t promise it’ll be the last.

I know you get it, but I know there’s going to be a lot of people saying “it’s just a large iPod touch” who aren’t looking beneath the surface on this thing.

Fraser Speirs, developer of numerous applications for Mac OS X and a few for the iPhone wrote a great post on why the iPad has the potential to be a huge deal:

I’m often saddened by the infantilising effect of high technology on adults. From being in control of their world, they’re thrust back to a childish, mediaeval world in which gremlins appear to torment them and disappear at will and against which magic, spells, and the local witch doctor are their only refuges.

With the iPhone OS as incarnated in the iPad, Apple proposes to do something about this, and I mean really do something about it instead of just talking about doing something about it, and the world is going mental.

And one more:

Think of the millions of hours of human effort spent on preventing and recovering from the problems caused by completely open computer systems. Think of the lengths that people have gone to in order to acquire skills that are orthogonal to their core interests and their job, just so they can get their job done.

Read the full post here.

At issue is that Apple could’ve gone with a operating system more like the desktop/laptop version of Mac OS X instead of something more like the iPhone/iPod touch. And for a very deliberate reason chose the iPhone OS – because they are trying to abstract a layer of complexity that has been in computers for a long time.

There’s no file system on the iPad. You don’t have to remember where you saved a document. When you open up Pages on the iPad to work on a document, it shows you a list of Pages documents. When you want to add a picture to your document, you just click the media button and it shows you all your pictures. It’s not unlike the iLife media browser you’ve already been using on your Mac, just taken to to the whole operating system.