See, that's the first thing that occurred to me. Why can't you use an emulator OR an older iPad for development for a couple of weeks?
Of course you can do development in the simulator or on an older model for a couple of weeks. Developing on the old model is probably a must-do for at least another year or two. Furthermore, while you do need to test on a device later in the dev cycle, I (and most other devs I know) actually don't deploy to hardware for days at a time early in the cycle.
Early in the iphone dev cycle there were enormous disparities between bugs on hardware and the simulator. Some symbols didn't even link consistently between the two and re targeting would cause compilation errors. This is no longer the case and the two targets are very, very close.
In fact, if someone told me they wanted to get into ipad development, I would tell them to write their app first, and then buy an iPad to test it on.
First, the lower amount of memory is very important for testing how your views load and unload.
Second I've noticed pretty big differences in how the screen looks on my MBP as opposed to on the actual device.