It is at the time when the definition of a word changes that the greatest oppertunities present themselves.
There is no iPad market, there is no tablet market - there is a computer market. This is what MS is up against...
[Sent from my iPod touch]
I think Steve was spot on with his car vs truck analogy: the iPad will be like a car, which everyone will have, and the computer will be like a truck, which people only have for special purposes.
That's what computers used to be anyway, and I think it will be fantastic to have them back in their niche again, instead of trying to please everyone.
In terms of niches, it's more like the XTerms of yesteryear. The terminals weren't much for horsepower; they were basically UI's that allowed you to work more or less transparently with whatever machine you wanted to, like that Cray Y-MP or SP2 cluster in the data center next door, or the SGI Indigo down the hall.
Snip the wires, shrink it down, modernize the internals and put a slick visual UI on it, and you have an iPad. Well, conceptually, that is.
This is what the iPad was made to do, and IMO is one of the reasons that it's successful -- it isn't pretending to be something that it isn't.