Seattle’s own branding and logo-design hotshot Tim Girvin offers his own historical thoughts about Apple, Steve Jobs, and the road to the iPad.

My own thoughts:

• I don’t yet know enough about it to know if it really is the gadget that will save the news media, let alone the book or TV industries. For instance, I don’t know if it will support full professional typography in publications distributed as iPad apps (it doesn’t support it in Apple’s own iBooks app). I strongly believe real fonts, chosen and tweaked and kerned by real designers (and not just the seven or eight “web-safe fonts,” either) are the key to making online-distributed reading matter seem professional enough to command a price.
• The hardware’s limitations don’t bother me. It doesn’t have a cell phone in it, but third party software will certainly being Internet-based phone calling to it. It doesn’t have a standard USB plug, but it will have an optional adapter for one (which means you can attach external storage devices, webcams, etc.).
• The software’s limitations concern me a bit more. A device meant to be, among other things, a full service Internet browser needs to be able to run Adobe Flash. A device meant to be an on-the-go field computer needs multitasking (more than one application running at one time), or at least a universal clipboard. With luck, these discrepancies should be fixed before long.
• What are the fine-print terms of the AT&T 3G data subscription, available as an option with the higher-end versions of the iPad? Could I use it with WiFi to run a Net connection into my regular computer?
• As UK comedy legend Stephen Fry notes, Jobs gives a helluva presentation. As others noted, Jobs and Obama, those two master sales-orators of our time, spoke on the same day. Obama’s speech was telecast and streamed live to millions. Jobs’s speech wasn’t, except for a few brief excerpts on CNBC. Most people who wanted to learn every detail as the announcement was happening had to settle for “liveblogging” text commentaries at various techie Web sites—which can actually be a more intimate, more involving medium than just watching somebody talk.
• I don’t care about the name, either way. And the jokes about it are already old; which is probably just how Apple predicted they’d be when the name was picked.
• Yes. I want one.