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it easier to use for Grandma and other non-techies, but it also limits the device’s potential utility. Granted, the iPad isn’t positioned as a replacement for a MacBook, but the ability to run even one or two third-party apps in the background would make the device far more versatile.

Personally, I would be very surprised if Apple doesn’t introduce at least a limited form of multitasking in iPhone OS 4.0. Of course, I also said the same thing last year about iPhone OS 3.0, so who knows. One point bears mentioning, though: despite the introduction of iWork for the iPad, Apple is still pushing the device as a platform for consuming media, not as a productivity platform. To get any serious work done, Apple still expects you’ll use your main computer, whether it’s a MacBook, iMac, or PC.

4. There’s not enough storage

The most important question to ask on this point is, “For whom?” Debra says the 64 GB model might have enough capacity for her purposes, but she also grouses about the price of that model, comparing it to cheaper netbooks with “four times the storage.” I will say that I’m puzzled at Apple’s decision to top out the iPad’s capacity at 64 GB, especially considering that’s where the iPod touch currently tops out. A 128 GB iPad would have been very tempting indeed; unfortunately, given the price of flash memory, it also would have probably cost more than $1000.

But what does 64 GB allow you to store? In my case, a 64 GB iPad would hold my entire 39 GB music library — 19 days worth of music — plus my entire iPhoto library of over 7000 photos, which, when optimized for the iPad’s screen, would probably take up somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 GB, plus or minus a GB or two. At my most app-crazy I had about 2 GB of apps on my iPhone 3G, and “Other” space, presumably including the OS itself, takes up just over 1 GB. Added up, that equates to 47 out of 64 GB. In my case, that leaves over 15 GB of space for document storage, videos, and so forth. Let’s say I store my entire Documents folder on the iPad (I wouldn’t — I use iDisk and Dropbox for that) — 4300 documents taking up just over 2 GB of space. Now we have 13 GB left over for videos and whatever else. Even if I left myself a 3 GB buffer for whatever reason (including accounting for the GB versus GiB difference), that’s still 10 GB of space for videos — enough to store 10 two-hour films at a decent bitrate, or almost an entire season of an hour-long TV series.

Let me break that down again — a 64 GB iPad would store:

— 19 days of music
— 7000 photos
— Well over 100 apps
— A 2 GB Documents folder with 4300 items
— 20 hours of video
— Around 3 GB of space left over for whatever else (temporary photo storage, e-books, accounting for the difference between binary gigabytes versus decimal gigabytes, etc.)

Granted, there are people out there with music and photo libraries larger than mine, but most of my Mac-using friends only have, on average, 1500 items in their iTunes libraries, a thousand or so photos, and maybe three pages of apps on their iPhones. 64 GB may not sound like much on paper, but practically speaking, it lets you pack around a lot of media. Unless you’re going to spend weeks at a time away from your main computer, the iPad should be able to carry around enough media to keep almost anyone entertained for days on end.

5. There’s no HDMI output or camera

Debra claims you can’t output the iPad’s video to an HDTV without an HDMI connector. That simply isn’t true; with a VGA adapter, you can output the iPad’s full 1024 x 768 video signal to an HDTV. With a component connector, you can output a 576p PAL signal or a 480p NTSC signal to your TV. Okay, fine, it’s not 1080p ultra-high-def video, but where exactly are you going to find video of that resolution anyway (besides Blu-Ray and Bittorrent)? I’ll admit that it would have been nice to have at least 1366 x 768 video, but I’m betting that the vast majority of consumers aren’t going to even bother hooking the iPad up to their TV at all when it’s far easier to just put the screen on their laps and watch a movie on the iPad itself instead.

(Whoops — as a few people have pointed out, 1080i is 1920 x 1080 [hence, you know, 1080i] and not 1366 x 768. That’s the resolution my HDTV has, and it claims to handle a 1080i signal — what I didn’t account for was that the 1080i signal gets deinterlaced to fit my screen’s resolution. I even used to sell these stupid TVs, so I really should have known better. Sorry about that.)

Another point Debra brings up is the iPad’s 3:4 aspect ratio, which is less than ideal for video. This has been argued all over the internet, including here at TUAW, but as many people have pointed out, the 3:4 aspect ratio is ideally suited to pretty much every other function on the iPad except video: books, documents, web pages, and photos are all laid out far closer to a 3:4 or 4:3 ratio than 16:9. Using a 16:9 ratio on the iPad would not only make the device larger than it already is, it would also leave all other forms of media on the device at a disadvantage compared to video.

The iPad’s lack of camera is another point Debra and others have brought out against the device, but like multitasking, this is one point on which I agree. A back-facing camera like the iPhone’s doesn’t make a lot of sense on the iPad — it would be a bit unwieldy trying to take pictures or video with a device this size, rather like trying to hold up a MacBook Air to take photos with its iSight. Most people probably have a standalone point-and-shoot camera that would take better stills and/or video than the iPad’s hypothetical back-facing camera anyway, and you can load those pictures directly onto the device with either the iPad-specific camera connector or SD card reader. But a front-facing camera for video conferencing definitely would have been a killer feature. Apple apparently thought so, too, because it actually included a space in the iPad for exactly such a camera, only to withdraw it for reasons known only to Apple. Whether the company is waiting for the next-gen iPad to introduce a camera or pulling a big switcheroo like it did with the original iPhone — which was originally supposed to ship with the scratch-prone plastic face of previous iPods, but was replaced with nearly scratch-proof glass in the six months between its announcement and release — no one can say.

6. There are no USB ports

Debra’s main complaints against the lack of USB ports are that you can’t hook up a flash drive or a USB keyboard. As far as the keyboard goes, I’ve already mentioned the fact that you can purchase a keyboard dock or use a Bluetooth keyboard. As for not being able to hook up a flash drive? I can see why some people might want to do this — expanding the iPad’s storage, transferring files, etc. But I’m willing to bet that for most people this isn’t going to be an issue. While I run the risk of sounding like Bill Gates’s infamous “640K should be enough for anyone” by saying so (although Gates never actually said that), 64 GB of space on a device like the iPad really should suit most users’ needs — at least for the next couple of years, anyway. As for transferring files? I can think of a number of existing, cloud-based solutions, the most simplistic of which is e-mail. No, you can’t transfer several gigabytes of files at a time through e-mail or “the cloud,” but most people don’t transfer that much data all at one go even a handful of times with a portable device, much less on a regular basis.

I’m not going to go full fanboy and say it’s a good thing the iPad doesn’t come with USB ports. In fact, I’m kind of with Debra and the others on this one in wishing that Apple included at least one USB port. While I probably wouldn’t use the port very often (if at all), it definitely falls into the category of “nice to have.” I’ve been an iPod user for almost five years and an iPhone user for a year, and I can count the number of times I’ve needed/wanted a USB port on one of those devices on exactly no fingers… but I’ll admit that I might sing a different tune with a bigger device like an iPad. But for most of the people who are likely to buy the iPad, i.e., the non-geek, non-techie, “I just want internet and music and movies” folks, they’re probably not going to miss USB ports at all.

7. There’s no flash memory slot

No, the iPad doesn’t have a flash memory slot. You can buy an SD card reader attachment, though, although Debra and others rail against the added cost of the connector, claiming that in order to reach “the functional equivalent of a netbook, you may end up spending a bundle.” A lot of the same arguments for or against USB apply here as well; most non-geeks aren’t going to miss an SD slot at all. Transferring documents via SD cards in 2010 reeks of the “sneakernet” we thought we were abolishing along with dot-matrix printers and 2800 baud modems; let’s just say that most users are going to have photos and/or videos on their SD cards, most users are going to wait until they get home to their main computer to upload those files, and most users aren’t going to care that the iPad’s missing a dedicated SD slot any more than they cared about the iPod missing one. If anything, the argument for an SD slot is far weaker than the argument for USB.

8. The price is not right

Debra claims the iPad “costs twice as much as the Kindle and other ebook readers.” That’s flat-out false. The $499 iPad does cost almost twice as much as the standard Kindle, but compared to every other e-reader out there, the iPad’s pricing is extremely competitive once you consider all the things the iPad does that the other readers iDon’t. A $489 Kindle DX, for example, while $10 cheaper than the cheapest iPad, doesn’t have a color screen,