This is really a very good point. The iPad still has a hard time looking for its killer app. And the pull to make the iPad more capable is, at its heart, “Why both an iPad and a laptop? My phone absorbed so many of the devices I used to carry; why can’t the iPad do the same?”

When it’s not trying to be all things to all people, Apple has a good story: there’s a single computing surface that spans the edge and the cloud, and whichever device you pick up should give you a window into it, though not always the same window.

So I can read web pages and send mail from my phone, but in many contexts my laptop is superior. The iPad is great somewhere in between but doesn’t leave the house. What the iPad did let me do was switch back to a smaller phone.

Another way to look at that last issue: the phone is hyper mobile. I can open an excel spreadsheet on it, in a pinch, and even edit it if it’s incredibly necessary. But never would I use it as my primary spreadsheet interface. And that’s OK. Likewise it’s a pain to pull out my laptop to look something up when I’m standing up someplace outside my office. That’s OK too.