Depends on what those “Flash” elements were. If they were h.264 videos from YouTube, Vimeo, or a few others with smart embedding fallbacks, they'll just work. If they are actual SWF embeds, then your users were probably confused.

Forgive me for feeding the troll, but what?

Anecdotes aren't evidence, of course, but I haven't had a single OS crash on my iPad in the two months I've owned it, and for browsing performance it roundly trounces my Acer Aspire.

Do you have anything to back these two howlers up?

Everything you mentioned can already be done in Mobile Safari, Check.in (from the Brightkite folks) is a web application that makes use of local HTML persistance, geolocation, and hides the browser controls. It looks and behaves exactly like a native iPhone app.

I elaborated above. CocoaTouch != Cocoa.

Yeah, in 1992 I was doing my emailing and Usenet reading from a NeXT box, so I kinda get it. :)

The APIs that people actually code to, CocoaTouch, are completely new. They resemble the Cocoa APIs, and even share a few method names, but they are not the same, which is one of the first things OS X programmers realize when they try to just recompile something they’ve written for the desktop. The kernel is the same, but I think we can agree that kernels are pretty much commodities at this point.

The HP device I thought we were discussing here was demoed as a Windows 7 tablet, which, as you note, has nothing to do with WinCE. Why are you moving the goalposts? I may be mistaken here, but does the WinCE family support multitouch at all?

One big way Apple’s been kicking people’s butts is by only showing things that become real products. It’s a lesson the rest of the industry should pay attention to.

Cool, that was pretty much the Elvis Presley of ad hominems. i salute you.

Well, I might as well just go home, then.

Honestly curious (not trying to be snarky), but how many truly tablet-centric applications did you regularly use? What proportion of the time we're you using applications that were really optimized for the form factor?

My (admittedly biased) experience has been that requiring developers to really think about the platform results in ultimately more satisfying applications.

It’s become pretty clear at this point that scaling a smartphone OS up, rather than scaling a desktop OS down, is the better approach. Someone had to stick their necks out and try it. Microsoft tried and failed to scale Windows down, but Apple has apparently succeeded going the other way. Let’s not forget that the outcomes were far from obvious even as recently as a few months ago. HP getting on stage with Microsoft in January was their throwing in their lot with the desktop approach. I think they’ll ultimately come out happier having reconsidered. It actually took corporate chutzpah for them to cancel the Windows 7 Slate after showing it.

You may be right, but remember: shipping is a feature, and, IMO, the most important one.
(disclaimer: happy iPad owner here...)

Sanyo != Sanrio.

Not trying to be snarky here, but have you actually spent any real time browsing on an iPad? A couple of months ago I might have agreed with you about the quality of the web browsing experience on mobile devices, but now I've owned an iPad for a month and use it full time at night and on weekends. The big reveal is with a fast browser on a large enough screen, mobile browsing really isn't painful. Browsing on the iPad really is a desktop quality experience for anyone who can't be arsed with Flash (I use a blocker on the desktop)

So, basically, your response boils down to "you're not me." Thanks for that, it really adds to the conversation.

The iPad is not sold as a standalone computing device -- it's plainly stated that iTunes running on OS/X or Windows is required for syncing. My media server (which is also the system that handles video downloads for the house) has an instance of Air Video Server running.

I should state that I have a netbook running Ubuntu as well. I nearly never used it for video playback except for files I'd preprocessed on a beefier machine, anyway, as it labors mightily when dealing with video that hasn't been downsampled. It's a much less pleasant video consumption environment than the iPad (less portable, runs hot, has noisy fans, and an inferior display.)