Since the iPhone was released in 2007 and the iPad in 2010, I’m going to suggest your timeline is backwards.
As I understand it, a semi regular dinner guest that worked at Microsoft, the husband of his wife’s friend or something like that, came around with a Windows tablet PC after they hit the market and was talking about how great it was and Apple didn’t have anything like this. Jobs saw it for the crap it was (touchscreen Windows was pretty bad back then) and to shut this guy up, put together a team at Apple to work on developing tablets. This was the project that would eventually spawn iPhones and later, iPads.
And I worked on the Pen Mac about fifteen years prior, so with that and Newton, Apple was working on the concept forever.