Another plus: The iPad supports a variety of e-reader apps. If an app can be created, it can be used here. Amazon and Barnes & Noble are among the many sources of e-reader apps; and newspaper publishers are using the iPad as a bona fide multimedia publishing platform. The trouble is, if you buy a book from Amazon, for example, you can read it only in Amazon's Kindle app. So if you start buying books from different sources, you'll soon lose track of which book lives where.

The iPad's excellent visuals make it ideal for displaying illustrated books or graphic novels and comics. Comics and graphic novels, in particular, looked compelling, based on the IDW and Marvel apps I tried.

With the iPad, Apple is first to market with a tablet that may have mass appeal for viewing entertainment content--movies, TV shows, games, and the like. But delve a bit deeper, and the iPad feels like a first-generation device--complete with new-product hiccups--largely behaves like an iPhone (or iPod Touch) on steroids. Its lack of file-level control means that the iPad can't replace a laptop or netbook for core productivity activities. Nor is it a great candidate to be your primary e-reader. It's a great device for playing video and games, and for viewing photos, though--and for some consumers, that may be enough.