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But to say the iPad is revolutionary isn't quite right. There's nothing like it out there, so there's no regime to change. One of the things that makes Apple unique is that it never holds focus groups. It doesn't ask people what they want; it tells them what they're going to want next. Where Microsoft likes to enter established markets and take them over by brute force, Apple works by creating new niches and dominating them from the get-go.
Nobody--not even Jobs, by his own admission--is sure what consumers will use the iPad for, but I'm guessing it will be the first true home computer. Conventional PCs live in studies; laptops make brief, furtive forays into the living room. The iPad will become the first whole-house computer, shared among an entire family, passed from hand to hand, roaming freely from living room to kitchen to bedroom to--look, it's going to happen--bathroom, at ease everywhere, tethered to nothing. It's not a revolution, but it's a real change, the kind of change you notice.
If I have a beef with the iPad, it's that while it's a lovely device for consuming content, it doesn't do much to facilitate its creation. The computer is the greatest all-purpose creativity tool since the pen. It put a music studio, a movie studio, a darkroom and a publishing house on everybody's desk. The iPad shifts the emphasis from creating content to merely absorbing and manipulating it. It mutes you, turns you back into a passive consumer of other people's masterpieces. In that sense, it's a step backward. Not much of a fairy-tale ending. Except for the people who are selling content.