Just wondering, we add all this security to desktops, and iPads seem to fly without a net.

Edit: Sometimes trying to type something in becomes painfully slow and I have to do either a soft or complete restart.

To date iOS devices have, if anything, been significantly less vulnerable to exploits than OS X for many reasons…

• Known vulnerable functionalities such as Java and Flash are not and have never been available for iOS,
• installing anything other than through the app store is only possible on devices that have been chain broken (which requires physical access to the device and immediately terminates any Apple support)
• "sandboxing" of all apps has been the only option for iOS since day one.
• "sandboxing" makes it very difficult, I would never say "impossible", for one app to spy on another
• NOTE: Cookie Stumbler has recently appeared in iOS but it requires user input and passwords to link it with Safari.
• High risk apps, such as those from financial institutions, often have their own at least semi-proprietary security measures. (I know of one that is encouraging its depositors to use their smartphone app rather than their web interface for security reasons. In fact some of their smartphone app technology has now been ported to their web app.)

I don't think it is unreasonable to assume that as the internet becomes a more and more hostile environment it is inevitable OS X will move closer and closer to the iOS model and features that have been "grandfathered" into OS X to support third party apps will become more and more restricted or even disappear altogether.

Well, once I thought I had typed in YouTube but apparently misspelled it and hit return and got one of those lock-down windows of death with an "ok" button to go somewhere and I had to do a restart to get it to go away.

I did have a keystroke capture on my desktop many, many years ago. The keyboard on my ipad often gets 'sticky' and slow.

I would like to just keep wiping the thing. The only thing I want are the bookmarks, but there seems to be no way for them to survive a wipe, no export, no nothing.

I'm getting more and more of an understanding of what my ex-girlfriend used to rant and rave about when DOS gave way to Windows, and I fully sympathize!

You are not going to like my answer but Safari on all my OS X and iOS devices are synched to iCloud and even if go to Settings > Reset > Erase All Contents and Settings (about as complete a wipe as possible, after I re-establish the iCloud account all of my Safari bookmarks are back just as they were before the wipe.

But, along with everything else, or can I just get the bookmarks reestablished?

You can narrow the link to Safari, which would include settings and bookmarks, but not just bookmarks.