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While it's still too soon to tell if it can live up to the insane amount of hype that preceded its introduction, the iPad is, more than any other product the company has made, the quintessential Apple device.

From the almost entirely homegrown technology, to the addition of the books counterpart to its iTunes media hub, to taking a risk on the middle category between smartphones and laptops, the iPad completes the picture for Apple in a lot of ways.

Steve Jobs used "revolutionary" to describe his company's newest device Wednesday, and while that's more than a bit over-the-top, the iPad does epitomize Apple's evolution. Before he even introduced the tablet Wednesday, Jobs brought up Apple's three main sources of revenue: the iPod, iPhone, and Mac have made Apple a $50 billion company. By basically discounting the iMac and other desktops (which makes sense, desktops have been headed downhill for a while), he pressed the point about what Apple has become: It's "a mobile device company," he said. "That's what we do."

Though he didn't say it specifically, he meant it as opposed to a computer company--a name they dropped in 2007--and as opposed to just a hardware and software maker. With few exceptions, Apple makes portable media-centric devices, and of those, the iPad is the one that brings all of Apple's businesses together.

With the iPad, Apple has a device that rounds out the company's product line and also moves the company forward toward being the spoke in the wheel that is the world of media and technology. Making something that fits between a smartphone and a laptop has been a goal for the consumer technology industry for more than a decade. The most recent attempt has been the Netbook. The iPad easily makes Netbooks seem boring and staid, and too close to the same old form factor, the computer. The iPad is taking a different tack: taking tasks that were too big for an iPhone and puts them on a device that isn't pocket-sized, but is more convenient to carry around than a 13- or 15-inch laptop.

It's risky, of course, to try to jump start a category that has never been proven. But it's also part of Apple's M.O.: the company has a vision for the mobile computer and media industries, and a lot of confidence in its abilities.

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That extends to the company's manufacturing and design. Apple has positioned itself so that it has to rely on very few outside sources to create the device. Plus, any sort of content you want on the iPad has to be, with few exceptions, bought through Apple as the middleman.

Looking back now, we should have seen this coming over the past few years: Apple wanted a new way of building their MacBooks, so they came up with the manufacture process where it's cut from a single block of aluminum. They wanted to make their own chip, so they bought PA Semi and created the "A4," which notably cuts Intel out of the equation. They also have their own battery technology and are using IPS, or in-plane-switching LCD technology, for the screen that allows quicker response times for viewing video and wider viewing angles.