Apple builds its ads around expressing the company's ethos, a message echoed in its press releases and live events: the company prides itself on making devices that do more than just get you from point A to point B faster. There's an alliance of form, function, and message in Apple's products and marketing that helps make them so effective.

At the end of the day, this ad, like so many of Apple's others, isn't about appealing to the feature-obsessed. In a brilliant move, the ad even points out the device's most significant positives--faster, thinner, lighter--while also appearing to brush them away as if they're incidental to the product.

Instead, Apple focuses on what technology frees you to do when it becomes transparent. When you don't have to worry about gigabytes, megahertz, or what version of Bluetooth you have. The company's is a perfect example of this philosophy in action.

And while there's been much pooh-poohing of Apple's repeated use of the word "magical," if you've ever seen a six-year-old kid's eyes light up when she realizes what she can with that iPad in her lap, well, you know there's more than a grain of truth in there.

The message of Apple's ad? The iPad 2 is the tablet for the things you can do--and want to do--. The future is here.