This was a very good article, @ChrisUpchurch, and it adhered to your well-designed objectivity standard. My biggest takeawy from this article and my own experience using iPad as my primary computing is that biggest bottleneck right now is not the hardware, it’s not the OS (mostly, but bear with me), it’s the third-party application software and web application design.
For my job, I often have to log into my Windows machine remotely from my iPad, so I know the pain of trying to interact with a user interface that is completely different from the machine I’m working on. It is analogous with how some native apps are designed. Of course iOS will seem “flawed,” when an app is designed for iPad just like it is on the desktop. There is a different interaction model (duh!) on an iPad then there is on a multi-window, mouse-oriented interface. Developers need to re-think and reorganize their apps’ interfaces to align better with how users actually use an iPad. There are some good examples of Apps that have done this.
Besides interface improvements on the apps themselves, there are two other things developers need to do better: enable more functionality in the app because the hardware certainly enables it; use the screen real estate better. I have read so many times, including in the article you linked, about users who are frustrated that iPad apps are often just scaled up iPhone apps. That annoys me, too. But it’s not Apple’s fault, it’s the app developers. Put the information that we need on the screen and make the things we need readily accessible.
Oddly, none of the journalists ever pick on the app developers. They fault iOS for this. But until developers truly start taking the computing needs of iPad users more seriously, this problem will not go away. I am hopeful that the announcement that you can use “full strength” Photoshop on iPad will stir some other developers into action.
Websites also need to improve for mobile, although, this is a little off topic. For reasons that I will not bore everybody with here, I recently had to use American Airlines browser standing in line at TSA with my wife and three kids. It took me forever to navigate the site because it was not enabled for touch. Selecting options in dialog boxes was dreadful, inserting information was a pain, I was constantly pinching and zooming, and I swear there was 500 savages with pitchforks and torches ready to kill me. The American Airlines native app is great and is, of course, designed for a touch interface. And, of course, having boarding passes in Apple Wallet is frictionless. But I was not able to get these boarding passes into either of those options.
The point of this rant is, to truly empower this platform we need developers to step up their game and design professional grade tools that are designed for iPad.