So, last night I got to play with an iPad for a couple of hours (thanks @davea!) and thought I’d post some of my initial impressions. Obviously these are my thoughts, your mileage may vary.

• It’s smaller than you probably think it is
• It’s exactly as big as you thought it was if you were sad enough to make an actual-size cardboard model of it months ago
• The screen is gorgeous. Really bright, the colours just jump out at you, and the viewing angles are unreal. Photos look brilliant on it, but you see a slight lack of resolution in text when you’re zoomed some way out of a web page.
• That said, because the screen is a piece of glass, it seemed as though glare could definitely be an issue depending on where you’re sat. I was trying to read Winnie-the-Pooh, and I could just see my face reflected in the screen because I was in the wrong position.
• It feels really nice in your hand. It’s a good weight (although lighter would be nicer) and it feels reassuringly solid.
• It’s fast. I’d read all the reviews saying how quick it was, but I didn’t expect it to be quite that quick. Everything just feels so slick and fluid, and I think this is a very big part of why I found it so nice to use.
• Web browsing and Google maps are just brilliant. Again, there was a lot of hyperbole about how browsing the web on this thing is a totally new experience and you have to try it to understand it - and whilst that’s a little OTT, I kind of get where they’re coming from. It feels very different (in a good way) from anything I’ve used before. For casual web surfing, lay back on the sofa or in a comfy chair, and for actually reading web pages, I think it’ll be brilliant.
• The Instapaper app was probably the nicest reading experience I came across while trying out the iPad. With the default font settings, it’s totally gorgeous. I could spend hours and hours working my way through my Instapaper reading list on this thing.
• Reading PDFs is also a pretty great experience. It’s so nice to be able to flick through a PDF, and hold it like a book. A vastly better experience than reading them on a laptop or on my Sony Reader (which is far too slow for PDFs, and they don’t work well with that screen size).
• Photos look great, and the slideshows work really well. The iPad would make a brilliant digital photo frame whilst not in use.
• The keyboard surprised me by being much more usable than I was expecting. Portrait mode’s a little cramped, but landscape seems nearly full size. Straight away, I was typing very quickly with very few mistakes. I could see myself inputting a lot of text without the need for an external keyboard. NaNoWriMo 2010, perhaps?
• It seems a very social device. Sure, we were all interested in trying it out and so it got passed around a lot - but it’s just so easy to spin it round or hold it up to show other people something cool. Or to load up an app and hand it over to someone to play with. It’s very unlike a laptop in that respect.
• The ‘just a big iPod Touch’ comment that people have made is total crap. iPhone OS on a device this size is a very different experience. The extra screen space adds a lot. Web browsing in particular feels completely different to browsing on an iPhone.
• My iPhone now seems very small, cramped, and slow.

I liked it, and can’t wait to get one. I think my primary use would be reading - Instapaper, websites, feeds, and PDFs. And I think I would use it a lot for all of those things. In fact, other than coding and managing my photos, I could see it replacing my laptop for a lot of things I do with my computer - namely, using the web, email, etc. And for me, that’d be a good thing - I hate being stuck behind a laptop when all I want to do is read. It’d be a nice distinction, because laptop would be for getting something done (coding, etc), and iPad would be for leisure. The iPad would also come in very hand whilst coding, for reference books, etc.