The iPad will be like any other computer product back to the late 1970's
You make a machine that people can program and some people will of course, attempt to create some wonderful software on the device that does something.
Naturally some will try and do things almost beyond what it can manage, often we are talking graphics, but we could be talking heavy calculations also.
The machine is not fast enough to run this in a nice way, so these people then fine tune their code to try and get it working at an acceptable speed for the user.
The iPad could be 1/4 the speed or 10x the speed and it would still be fast for some things and not fast enough for others.
You need to think of it the other way round. The machine speed is a fixed thing. It's the software and what people try and do that deems it being fast or slow.
Compared to a modern PC, yes it's slow technically, but the software has been written in a way to make what it does appear quickly.
It's a bit like saying if my bucket big enough, well, yes, if you don't put a lot in it, it's very big, of course there will always people who will try and overfill it and say it's too small.
If it could play Crysis with all effects on at say 60 frames/sec then I'd probably say not many people would complain.
Perhaps in 10 or 15 years it might be able to
