Steve Jobs was directly responsible for the death of the Apple Newton/MessagePad. The Newton/MessagePad was the result of an extremely innovative few that became a massive team and project at Apple. Upon Job’s return to Apple, the Newton died in 1992. Jobs had made several comments over the years that he was not enamored with the Newton.

The iPad was never going to be the second coming of the Apple Newton despite the fevered dreams of Mac zealots and gadget geeks alike. As much as I wanted the iPad to be a PowerBook Air sans Keyboard, Jobs would never gut his own product line to produce a true OSX tablet. Nor would a true OSX tablet do well, since the last 20 years of the Fujitsu Stylistic, PenPad, HP TabletPC, and others have never made the tablet market emerge from anything more than a niche market.

The iPod was revolutionary. The iPhone was revolutionary. The iPad was “meh” because people expected a powerhouse tablet to act as a PC replacement and got an oversized iPod Touch or iPhone. What people fail to recognize is that they truly got an netbook replacement. Rather than spending $300-$600 on a netbook running a flaky, inconsistent distro of Ubuntu or Windows, they can spend that same about of money on a iPad running iPhoneOS 3.x or 4.x…

Which brings me to the OS. iPhoneOS 1.0-3.2 is a wonderful OS for a handheld device with a small screen to act as a phone, media player, or handheld web device. I am not sure if it is the same OS we should have running on a larger form-factor device with more than double the processor specs, memory, and storage. Of course, people are also running “Ubuntu Netbook Remix” or “Windows XP Tablet Edition” on their netbooks. People seem to prefer a dumbed down, minimal OS as their OS for handhelds and not a bloated, resource-intensive OS best fitted for power-hungry laptops and desktops.

I think people don’t give Jobs enough credit. The iPad is a more elegant netbook. iPhoneOS 4.0 might not allow third-party multitasking on an iPad outside of the Core Services already allowed by iPhoneOS 3.x, but then do you really want your 1GHz iPad dogging because of some shittily-written app with a memory leak or a runaway process. Apple has higher standards for thread control and process management than Microsoft does.

I’ll most likely buy an iPad come March. I’ll also be looking for a new home for my then-defunct Fujitsu Lifebook U820, which was a powerful beast for what it does but an ill-fitting form factor for what I wanted (and needed it to do), which was to be a great netbook.

The real question becomes: do you expect your netbook to a power-hungry small laptop, or do you expect your netbook to be a great web device? If it’s the latter, then maybe the iPad truly is better than your existing netbook.