The dust has finally settled and rumors have been confirmed or laid to rest – yesterday Apple officially announced their latest shiny object, the iPad.

The transformative nature of this device has been discussed over and over again by tech industry experts, bloggers and pundits leading up to the event. Apple is billing it as “magical” and “revolutionary.” After watching video of the Steve Jobs keynote last night, I’ve formed a few opinions of my own on how I see this thing getting used.

(Side rant: The name “iPad” is a yawner. I would have preferred Tablet or Slate.)

There are hundreds of thousands of voices out there dismissing this device as just another eReader, a super-sized iPhone, a laptop lid without a keyboard, etc. – many of these are legitimate comments. Meanwhile, hundreds of people are getting busy brainstorming applications and building stuff for the iPad, and figuring out opportunities for how it will fit into their industry. That’s going to be the focus of my post.

Just to recap what the iPad can do right now: Web browsing, eBooks, email, music, video, photos, games and the iWork software suite. Lots of devices can do these things, so let’s go deeper.

Textbook Publishing

Jobs briefly touched on the textbook market during his keynote, and by “briefly touched on” I mean he spent about one second on it. I think textbooks are one of the first industries that the iPad can disrupt. Think about the textbook business as it exists today: College students end up spending hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars, on heavy books for their classes that get used for five months and then discarded. I’m envisioning a future where students purchase digital books through the iTunes store for anywhere between $9.99 and $29.99 each.

Calling them “books” might be a mistake – these could potentially be very interactive pieces of content that include motion graphics, video, audio and social interactivity intertwined with the text itself. Make this device affordable and accessible to a generation that grew up digital, and I think the iPad can have a huge impact on how textbooks are purchased and read.

Today a student in my internet marketing class (@ Drake University) asked: “What about people who like to highlight their texts?” I love it when a common-sense perspective like this completely stops me in my tracks. We can’t dismiss the tactile quality and experience that tangible books give us – the eReaders will have a hard time replacing this aspect.

Healthcare

Every day we get closer to medical records being 100% digital and stored in the cloud. I see huge potential for touchscreen tablet devices being used among physicians, nurses and psychiatrists. Custom-built applications would allow them to pull up patient records on the screen, add annotations, cross-check details against other information databases (drug reactions, symptoms, etc.). Don’t be surprised if some kind of visual-based translation software gets built for the iPad – helping doctors and nurses communicate directly with patients who speak a different language, without needing to pull in a third party. You can expect Rosetta Stone to make a play here.

Everything I described above would require note-taking, so the iPad is eventually going to need some sort of add-on stylus pen and sophisticated handwriting recognition. For instance my wife, a licensed therapist, is going to want to take hand-written notes during session and have them automatically transcribed and synced to systems elsewhere.

Television

The infrastructure to completely disrupt television networks is *almost* in place with on-demand services like Hulu, Netflix and iTunes. Apple knows that every day people are firing their cable company and consuming TV content on their laptops, smartphones and/or services like Boxee. (We just did and we’re saving $70/month.)

What’s missing is a device that can replace those cumbersome laptops that we crawl into bed with to watch The Colbert Report. Apple believes their iPad fits this niche. There’s a strategic reason why Jobs did much of his keynote from a couch. I’m a firm believer that watching television shows will be one of the biggest uses of tablet devices, for those “in-between” moments: In bed, on that couch, riding on the train or sitting in the airport. (Yes, portable DVD players officially died yesterday.) Of course, Apple will want you to watch TV via episode purchases or subscription through their iTunes choke point.

Much to the dismay of many geeks like myself, the first iPads will not support Flash, meaning that watching Hulu is out of the question – at least right out of the gate. It remains to be season whether HTML5 (currently in its “last call” stage) will solve this issue, reducing the need for browser plug-ins that display video.

I could go on and on, but I’ll stop there. Yes, Apple is going to create this new market, but I’m not yet convinced that the iPad will reign supreme as *the* ubiquitous device as they have done with the iPhone and iPod. For instance, publishers and content-owners are fighting already back with their own innovations. Hearst just launched the Skiff (an eReader with a flexible display, shown to the right) which is very intriguing. I’m going to have a blast watching this space evolve.

What are your thoughts? Does Apple have something here, or will someone else do it better? Do you see yourself using this device, and what industries do you think it will disrupt?