To those who say "this is what you want to blow your money on?"
It's $330. The OP could easily spend that on *LOTS* of other things if he has that much disposable income. I've spent that much on LEGOs for my (8 year old) daughter over the years; an iPad might be a perfectly equivalent investment. How about three months of highish-end cable TV? How about an iPad mini instead of a game console?
Just think about how many things *YOU* have that cost $330; or services that cost that much over even a 6-month span. That's one of the great things about the iPad mini, it is cheap enough that it is actually cheap.
I'm by no means well off (single income; just barely enough for the family to pay all our bills,) but we save in many ways (no paid TV other than Netflix through the Winter each year; newest car is 2004, been paid off for years; newest computing device is the first-generation iPad, acquired in trade for an older gaming PC right after the iPad 2 came out; newest computer is a 2008 iMac, newest laptop is the first generation Core Duo MacBook; etc.) which means we CAN afford the occasional luxury. A standard two-income family should have no problem choosing to save for a few months to buy an iPad for the kid.
Those of you who ask why a 3 year old "needs" it... He/she doesn't. But what's wrong with having it? My parents didn't have a TV when they were 3, but I did. I didn't have a computer when I was 3, but my children did. Why shouldn't a child now have something that is the new equivalent tech item? (When I was in high school, cell phones were nonexistent among students - I knew one person who had one, and he was two years older than I, and got it right after graduation. I was one of an extremely small number of students at my college that had a laptop and a cell phone. Yet now middle school students have a cell phone more likely than not. Schools are giving out laptops and/or iPads. Including elementary schools. Such is the march of progress.)
As a parting photo, here's my daughter when she was just shy of two years old, on what was completely her laptop: