People have wondered what the Apple iPad (Apple iPad page) is for. But really Science Fiction provides the answer, in the form of Star Trek's PPAD, the portable display devices. Particularly by Star Trek:TNG , the PPADs were a ubiquitious way of visualising and handing information around, much preferable to randomly printing things out just to hand them to someone (which still seems to happen in offices everywhere). The iPad is the same -- same form factor, and same purpose -- in a way that is likely to be more successful than NetBooks for the visualisation-heavy, data-entry-light uses.

One application which makes this purpose especially obvious is Elements, which allows visualising all the chemical elements in real time, including rotation of the elements. As described in that article it was created by a team of 4, in 60 days flat, given only an extremely extensive database of high resolution photographs of each element and the raw chemical information (both produced for a book that one of the team recently published). They explicitly set out to create a magical "Harry Potter" interface, and appear to have succeeded. It brings to mind the famous Arthur C Clarke quote, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

As William Gibson observed, "The future is here - it is just unevenly distributed." (This is especially true in New Zealand, where the iPad is not available -- due to being unable to produce them fast enough, having sold half a million in the USA already.)

(Thanks to bitpuddle for the link.)

ETA, 2010-08-11: Star Trek artists on PPAD and iPad, (via Slashdot).