The TAC website was hacked to death the night before Apple’s iPad launched, so my initial reactions to the shiny new gadget went out via Twitter rather than this blog. I wasn’t too impressed — like a lot of critics, I concluded it was an oversized iPod Touch, which is already a product in search of a point.

A week later, I’m not so sure. If I was once willing to follow Ann Kirschner in pronouncing the mere iPhone a Kindle killer, the iPad ought to be the real thing. Having grown accustomed to the Kindle as an easy-on-the-eyes reader for free PDF’s, I’m not eager to adopt the iPad as a replacement. But despite Amazon’s gangbusters Christmas sales, there are still a lot of people out there who might want just a reader, and for them the iPad may prove irresistible. The appeal of e-ink only became apparent for me once I had tried a reader that uses it; with the iPad now on the market, many consumers won’t even want to try an alternative. (Especially since you can’t try a Kindle in stores.)

Beyond its uses as a reader, could the iPad be revolutionary as the first couch computer — a device with no pretenses to being a business machine? Sure, it’ll have some ancillary business uses, but that’s not the iPad is about, whereas the personal computer has always had unavoidable associations with productivity. It’s a business machine that has taken up residence in your home and follows you on vacation. The iPad, on the other hand, is responsibility-free. At first I thought that must be a drawback, but maybe it’s a selling point: the iPad is the first truly casual computer. You could hardly get any work done on it if you tried.

I suspect there is a niche for such a thing, but not a big one. You might leave it lying around the living room or kitchen to check sports scores, movie times, and TV schedules, as well as e-mail. Maybe that’s a bigger niche than I realize, though: instead of powering on a desktop or laptop or squinting at a phonescreen, why not pick up an iPad for whatever kind of browsing you need to do when you come in from mowing the lawn?