But the iTunes [Music] Store—the solution to "The market wants to get music from the internet legally and they want to do it simply"—wasn't launched until a full year and a half after the introduction of the iPod. (Heck, the App Store wasn't launched until a full year after the introduction of the iPhone, yet now is widely held to be the iPhone's raison d'être.) So until the iPad has been upon us for awhile, I do think the current reactions can be seen as analogous to those experienced by the iPod.
As for the reading experience, I think there's a distinction to be made between the iPad and devices such as the Kindle which use e-ink technology. Any "brilliant" display is likely to be hard on the eyes when reading for an extended period of time, but the Kindle and other dedicated e-readers don't employ such displays. Would you disqualify those as well?
Or are you saying the "form factor" of a flat-screen-display housed in a rigid body—however thin and light—doesn't comport with your sense of the novel-reading experience? I'm inclined to agree with you in specific regard to lengthy books.
Interestingly, though, my news and information gathering habits have evolved over the past eight or ten years to the point at which virtually all useful written data is acquired via the internet...and the experience of consuming it on an upright monitor while sitting in a desk chair is barely tolerable at best. A laptop would be somewhat better, but it'd be a lot easier to justify a $500 device I can hold in my hands than a $1000 device not designed for reading postures and needing to be charged every three hours.
And yes, if I were only interested in using an electronic device for reading, and someone's e-reader offered the ability to download newspapers, magazine articles, .pdf instruction manuals, blogs, forums, knowledge-base documents, and email in addition to books...then I'd probably prefer the e-ink solution.
