There's an acute problem with using the iPad Mini that no one has yet mentioned here. The text is too damn small unless you have perfect eyesight. For example, Hacker News in Safari on the Mini appears in a super tiny font. If you pinch-zoom, the edges of the page roll off the screen, and you'd be constantly panning left and right. I've tried extensions that increase the font size on web pages -- they all have some failing, like making the letters run together or messing up tables.

I'll grant that this is not the fault of the iPad Mini itself. I blame web standards and browsers for not requiring all parts of a page to scale linearly and re-flow cleanly. It is (in theory) a problem solvable entirely by software. However, the reality of the web is what it is. If you don't have perfect eyesight, it's better to buy a large iPad with the same resolution as the Mini, and then everything is nice and legible. It's a shame because I love the portability of the Mini.