Well, the iOS way would be that documents would end up in a place that is shown when you open a word processor, and that pictures would end up in a place that is shown when you open up an image navigator.
I have a set of documents, a subset of which I'd like to copy onto my USB drive. I also have a set of pictures, a subset of which I'd like to copy onto my USB drive. My USB drive already has a set of documents and a set of pictures, and I'd like to get a subset of the documents and a subset of the pictures onto internal storage so that I can plug out my USB drive afterwards and still access them. Can you come up with a way of doing all that that doesn't involve a filesystem or a poor imitation of it?
Aha, therein lies the rub. These documents could be essentially arbitrary files, and there's no substitute to a general purpose file manager for them. Writing an app for every single file format that could be present on the USB drive is highly inefficient compared to the usual file manager.
My basic point is that filesystems are a well-established standard, and practically everything on your computer supports them. If you'd like to deviate from such a standard, you'd better have a very good reason for doing so.
If that doesn't work for you, then okay. You're not most people.
This is interesting. For example, my mom knows the document she wants to open is her 2009 tax return document. The fact that it is a PDF or she reads it with Adobe Reader -- I'm fairly certain she doesn't know. If I were to layout every application she has installed and told her to find the one to open to access her tax documents I honestly don't think she'd have a clue. She'd probably try Word. I suspect she's not alone on this.
Maybe you can provide a practical example of a case where you need to move files onto your system that can't be opened by any of the applications installed on your system. I can't think of a single time I've needed to do that. Files don't have inherent value. They're only useful if you have software that can make use of them.
I never said the files couldn't be opened by any of the applications on my system -- I just said the files couldn't be managed by any of them. Note the very important difference.
Regardless, here's an instance that came up just a few days ago: I have multiple computers and have software to deal with a certain file format installed only on some of them. I needed to back up the contents of a USB stick containing some such files on a computer that didn't have the software.
-> Write code, -> Dump logs to app.log, app.err -> Is there an err browsing app you're aware of ?
If that ever happened to someone on HN, the consequences:
-> If apple implemented something so broken, some nutter would explain to me what extension to use. -> If MS implemented it, there would be a #1 post on HN with the title "MS file management is broken beyond repair and company is irrelevant"
I expect to be downvoted for this but it is impossible to have a fair discussion about Microsoft products.
Plug an SD card with photos on it into the iPad camera connection kit, and plug that into the iPad. The Photos app opens, you tap the photos you want to import, and you're done.
Your other cases are simple extensions of this example. The fact that an iPad can't do this right now with more file types or with a USB drive is not an inherent limitation of the approach.