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.
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