For the people who are looking to buy a laptop or netbook, the iPad wont be a replacement for that. However, I don’t think that this is meant to compete with a netbook. I don’t know quite what Apple is intending the iPad for either. However, I can see some uses in things like education/medicine (with more and more pre-university level schools giving out BOTH laptops and textbooks, it would make sense to just give out a single device that would replace both the books and the laptop, while being cheaper and much lighter on the back than both).

Reading an ebook on a netbook or laptop is not an ideal experience, and this is where the iPad’s strength lies. As a tablet-style ebook reader, I think it will blow most of the current competition out of the water, unless you really want an e-ink screen. I think this because of a) the full colour display (instead of black and white) for things like pictures and graphs, and also b) because of the very broad implementation of the EPUB standard (so book publishers can include lots of multi-media in their books). To illustrate how EPUB might come into play, let’s say you are reading a book where -for example- an interview the author did gets referenced, and you can just tap to watch that full video without having to leave your “book”, I think that’s a very compelling thing that will jump out when somebody uses the device. Without a doubt, it will still be a luxury device though, not something everybody and their third cousin has.