The post announcing the original iPhone in 2007 had almost as many "negative" ratings as "positive," 494 to 434 (https://www.macrumors.com/2007/01/09/apple-announces-the-iphone/). The fifth comment in the thread, typical of many others, was: "Wow, extremely disappointed that there's no MVNO. Talk about a letdown."
Yup, the MR forums labeled the iPhone a failure for, among other reasons, its lack of an MVNO.
Here we go again with the iPad. People are saying it's not innovative because it looks like a big iPod touch. What did you expect an Apple tablet computer to look like other than an iPod touch that's larger? It doesn't have Flash. Beyond YouTube, which has terrific iPad support, is Flash really that important to your day-to-day life?
What major functionality can the iPad not do that you want it to do? Why are people so desperate to focus in on one small technology that it doesn't have to color the whole device a failure?
What this is is a device that does most of what a laptop does, including creating/editing documents, and even does many things a lot better than a laptop--except for it's so much smaller/lighter (1.5 lbs, 0.5 inches) than even crappy netbooks, and it has so much better battery life.
flash is useful for browsing websites such as shopping a companies store (often, a companies webpage will be flash, example DKNY Jeans is an entirely flash page)
also, no USB? I could see no disc drive. Thats obvious. But no USB? I guess I'm just disappointed that this is still tethered to iTunes, and not something I could buy and use without ever having another computer. I was hoping this would be something that a consumer who doesnt need a powerful, fully featured computer could buy and use for web browsing, email, and media. But without a computer with iTunes or a grotesque amount of money to spend on iTunes on the iPad, say goodbye to that media option