After some snafus with FedEx (involving their website saying they’d tried to deliver the package and I wasn’t home, when they hadn’t and I was) my iPad finally arrived at about 3:30 yesterday afternoon. My thoughts after 16 hours:

It’s obvious how much attention Steve Jobs has paid to the user experience. Everything about the iPad just works, and just works with a smoothness and ease that I’ve never seen before in a computer – even in a full OS-X Mac. Xeni Jardin had it right: the iPad scratches an itch you didn’t know you had. Or, as Kenneth Burke would put it when talking about form, it’s the perfect example of something that creates a need in its audience and then fulfills it.

This isn’t a laptop killer. I wasn’t expecting it to be, so it’s not like I’m disappointed about this, but it needs to be emphasized. I’m typing this entry on the iPad and, while I’m faster on this than I am on my iPhone, it still doesn’t compare to an actual hard keyboard. The keyboard dock I bought would obviously help a bit, but on the road I prefer portability over function.

I still don’t quite know how to hold it on my lap, at the table, etc. This, I suppose, will get better with time.

Major League Baseball has the best new media people of any of the major sports. the MLB AtBat app for the iPad is as pretty as it is useful. And full-screen video of the games (with my mlb.tv subscription) is absolutely gorgeous.

I haven’t tried the 3G yet. I’ve made a deal with myself here that I’m not going to buy the 3G coverage until I need it – and thus far, everywhere I’ve gone with the iPad has had Wi-Fi. But Wi-Fi on this thing really hums… It’s like everything about the iPad is designed to make the Internet experience ridiculously fast and smooth.

I don’t feel like I’m missing anything without Flash – except maybe watching Hulu on my iPad. The web is plenty functional without Flash, which is rather inefficient anyway. People can’t adopt HTML5 soon enough, in my opinion. But still – Hulu on the iPad would make my iPad user experience complete. Get on that, Steve Jobs and the Hulu people.

Hand-coding even rudimentary HTML on this thing is a pain in the ass. Hopefully, since its a software keyboard, future updates will include customizable keyboard layouts so that the brackets could be more accessible (or even entirely different input modes, like context-specific keyboards or something cool like that). Incidentally, when I try to hand-kludge the Unicode character for the brackets, the WordPress app crashes out. A lot of the third-party stuff on the iPad is still in kinda alpha mode, where developers are waiting to see what people are doing with their apps.

Overall, after 16 hours on this thing, here’s the verdict: What it was designed to do, it does incredibly well. This is the ultimate machine for someone who wants to surf the web, do some mailing, play with docs, or read on the go. It’s smooth, responsive, and incredibly fun to use. While I think there are a lot of possibilities for Apple or third-party developers to expand the functionality, at the moment, it’s still just really good at doing what it’s supposed to do. And that’s enough, for now…