Have run the gamut of devices, purchased the iPad 1 when it came out, but sold it on after a few months, and upgraded the MBP instead. Biggest gripe was the difficulty it working with larger office documents, and at the time no solution to open password protected .xls sheets. Also there was no dropbox or similar so moving documents between devices was very tiresome.
Earlier this year out of principle purchased a Xoom, which while it was good, always felt clunky, and had numerous stability problems. By far and away the biggest issue though was the lack of apps (including glaringly for me Zinio). Sold it on after a month …
So biting the bullet have purchased an iPad 2, and have been very impressed with the developments in the overall package (i.e. the Apps as well as the device itself). Its definitely a convenience item though and I wouldn’t like to be without a desktop / laptop.
By comparison the wife has a work provided 11″ Mac Air, and while it is impressively quick and capable, the screen feels very pillar box by comparison. The ergonomics of it as a browsing device just lack somewhat.
Interestingly have been following the dumping of the HP tablet on the market (hence the firesales of £99 last Friday). One of the reasons behind it was the developers running the same applications on a jailbroken Ipad2 and getting twice the performance levels in return. Think they then realised it was time to pack up shop and admit defeat.
The next iteration of the iPad will be very interesting, screen resolutions etc lesser so than the move to a virtual / cloud based system. The advantage of apple is the entire infrastructure of their product.