I have a stack of unwritten and partially-written blog posts in my “to do” list and my drafts folder. These include such vital topics as the war in Afghanistan, the future of Facebook and the spat between Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien. But because I am a great big gadget nerd, I am going to disregard all of those important topics tonight and, rather than finish one of those posts, I am going to write about the Apple Bloody Tablet or, as we now know we should be calling it, the iPad.

Throughout much of the 97-minute presentation a couple of hours ago in San Francisco, I was disappointed. The iPad seemed an impressive piece of kit, but essentially, just an overgrown iPhone. However, my dissapointment was grounded in the expectation of a price point around the $1000 mark, as frequently leaked in recent weeks (it’s now tempting to conclude that Apple was, in fact, tacitly allowing quite a bit of technical information to leak, the better to keep secret the real surprise: the price. When Jobs announced the starting price point of $499, I’ll admit my jaw dropped. Of course, it’s possible to spend almost double that on an iPad to get the top spec, and many Apple fanboys inevitably will. But that low starting price suggests that Apple is taking on the netbook sector head-on and ensures that the iPad will, at the very minimum, sell respectably.

After the end of the event, and having perused follow-up reports like Engadget’s hands-on with the device, here are some more thoughts.

It’s clearly an masterpiece of engineering. Innovations like the MacBook Air have made us used to ultra-thin screens, but nevertheless, a full-fledged computer with a 10″ touchscreen, no thicker than an iPod, is impressive by any standards. From close-up photos it appears to be extremely solid, essential for a product like this with aspirations to being carried around in people’s bags. Perhaps the most impressive part of the Apple presentation was actually when the screen flashed up a picture of Amazon’s Kindle. Seeing it, with its strange tilt-buttons and enormous frame-to-screen ratio, made it clear just how nice-looking the iPad is for its size.

It’s big. It wasn’t until I saw the shot of a iPad next to an iPod that I realised just how big. A 10-inch 4:3 screen with a broad frame makes it substantially bigger than the 10-inch 16:9 Samsung netbook I’m typing this on; and substantially larger than the Kindle, which by all accounts only just manages to be handbag-friendly. What does this mean? It means the iPad will be provide a rich experience for media and web browsing, but also that it’s destined primarily for the home rather than portable use - which is probably why they felt comfortable making 3G optional.

It may not be as satisfying a web experience as Steve Jobs wants us to think. At 1024×768, the iPad has a high enough resolution to show a standard 1000-pixel web page at full size in portrait mode. However, the presentation made it clear Apple expect users to primarily use the device in portrait mode - and it certainly looks like it would be more comfortable in that configuration. That means viewing web pages designed for a 1024-width screen with a 768-wide screen, slightly zoomed out. It’s likely that the user going to the New York Times website with the iPad in portrait will still need to zoom in to read stories, which isn’t really a sufficiently big leap up in user experience from the iPhone.

Why didn’t Apple cram in more resolution? After all, higher resolution would improve the iPad’s usefulness as an e-book reader, which is clearly supposed to be part of its attraction; and would have enabled the iPad to accurately boast HD video, although the fact that the iPad’s actual resolution doesn’t allow for HD didn’t stop Jobs bragging that it could play it for some reason.

It’s unlikely that it would have added much cost - Dell have introduced a high-resolution option to its Mini 10 netbook for just $40 extra. Obviously, higher-resolution touchscreen would cost more. But I suspect the real issue is users’ eyes.

A 10-inch screen running at 1024×768 produces a pretty standard pixel density - the number of pixels along an inch of screen line - of around 100 per inch. That’s relatively easy on the eye, but go any higher than that and some users report strain and headaches. Apple has had some of this trouble with its new 27″ iMac, which with a resolution of 2560×1440 boasts an unusual pixel density of around 110 ppi. And the iPad is designed to be held relatively close to the face, which could have made eye strain even worse.

Granted, my flatmate spends whole evenings surfing the web on his iPhone, so having to zoom in is clearly not an experience-destroying problem. But I do wonder if, in a future iteration, they shouldn’t try to get the portrait width up to 1024 pixels, even if it means an 11″ screen.

It’s far more of a gamble than the iPhone. We don’t know much about the level of investment that’s gone into the iPad, though leaks and rumours from Cupertino suggest it’s been substantial. But whatever money Apple has invested, it’s taking more of a risk with it than with its (probably bigger) initial investment into the iPhone.

The iPhone was essentially based on a gamble: that users would like multi-touch enough to upgrade to their first smartphone. The cost to consumers of enjoying the intuitiveness of multi-touch, in comparison to other phones and smartphones, was a somewhat higher price - offset by a 2-year contract - and a crap camera. In retrospect, consumers were clearly always going to bite Apple’s hand off.

This time, Apple is making a similar, but much riskier, gamble: that users will like multi-touch enough they’ll choose the touch-rich, but extremely limited, iPhone OS over a Windows netbook, the iPad’s most obvious competitor. Unlike upgrading to the iPhone from, say, a Symbian handset, switching from a netbook to an iPad as your second computer requires giving up a lot of capability - the ability to run more than one program at once; the ability to run most applications, at least until the App Store fills up with iPad-designed apps. Granted, the iPad version of iWork demonstrated today shows the potential is there for iPad software far more powerful than any iPod app. But it could be months or years before a range of software is available that can begin to replace the range of software available for Windows (or, for that matter, full-scale Mac OS X).

In addition, there’s a host of tasks people use netbooks for which the iPad just doesn’t seem to be able to do. Notably, there’s acting as a media hub. Like many people, when I got my netbook, I continued to use my desktop computer for managing photos, podcasts and my music collection. Then, as I found myself using the netbook more and more, I copied the collections over, for a while storing my media on both computers and trying to keep them in sync. But soon enough, I realised that I hadn’t used my desktop for several weeks. My netbook - a bog-standard Samsung NC10 with the usual 1ghz/1gb/160gb specs - had proven more than powerful enough to be my main computer. It’s the netbook I plug my phone, camera, and MP3 player into to charge and refill them.

By contrast, the iPad’s reliance on iPhone OS means it’s incapable of being, in Apple’s own parlance, a “digital hub.” You can’t plug an iPod into an iPad to manage the music on it - both have to be plugged into a Mac or PC. Even just getting pictures of an SD card will, by all accounts, require an additional kit. You can’t even transfer files to the iPad to use on those lovely iWork apps on a USB stick: no USB ports.

None of this is surprising. Apple’s “digital hub” strategy is designed to have a Mac in the middle. Granted, it may have made a lot of money from the gadgets - iPod, iPhone, and now iPad - around the edges. But it’s not going to give those items the power to render the hub redundant. Apple aren’t going to cannibalise its sales of $1000+ Macs to sell their $499 iPad.

But though it’s not a surprise, the iPad’s limitations - no multitasking, no media hub, no USB - are a problem because they make it impossible to even consider the iPad as your only, or even main, computer. Picture the scene: you’re at home, on your sofa, surfing the web on your iPad. You see your favourite website has put up a new episode of your favourite podcast, and you want to download it and put it on your iPod. Can’t do that with the iPad, so you go upstairs, get your laptop, and bring it downstairs. Ten minutes later, having downloaded and transferred the podcast, you realise you’re now surfing the web with your laptop, and the iPad is sitting unloved on the floor.

Apple have made their career as a company out of closed systems: the Mac is a closed system, in that the software doesn’t run on other manufacturer’s computers and Apple’s computers don’t (OK, didn’t until recently) run Windows. With the iPhone, Apple took the closed system a step further, allowing only those applications officially approved by Apple themselves to be installed. This works fine in the mobile phone world, where the whole idea of installable software is a new one. But it’s a very different proposition in the personal computer market, which for all Jobs’ talk of a “third category”, is ultimately where the iPad will compete.

The iPad seems to me like a sort of Bang & Olufsen version of a netbook: lush, beautifully put together, but actually no more useful than a cheaper one. The benefits of the iPad’s power are likely to be negated by the limitations of the software available for it being subject to Apple’s whim.

Will the iPad prove as successful as the iPhone? I doubt it; the iPhone has performed well in an existing product category, whereas the iPad is trying to create a new one. But what’s more, I hope not. For millions of people to spend much of their computing time, between iPhone and iPad, in front of a closed OS would be bad for innovation, bad for competition, and bad, ultimately, for users. Windows, as depressing as its dominance is, is at least an open platform for development with millions of applications, ranging from thousand-pound professional suites to 50k applets, available all over the place. iPhone OS couldn’t be more the opposite. And while that approach has worked in the mobile realm, it’s far from clear users will accept it in a home computer. And, in my view, they probably shouldn’t.