The level of snark and scorn which greeted the OP's thesis is disappointing, but hardly surprising. Obviously many of the people who habituate this forum are incapable of having a rational discussion on any topic that varies from the party line. A few news items from dodgy Asian websites and its automatically assumed that the next iPad will have a retina screen, and woe betide anyone who tries to question it.
The fact of the matter is that there are a number of very good reasons why the next iPad won't have a different screen resolution.
To begin with, of all the things that could use improvement on the iPad, screen resolution barely makes the list. Most people older than about 20 or so would have a very hard time indeed visually noticing a difference in pixel size, especially at the somewhat greater distances we hold tablets as opposed to smartphones.
Secondly, people seem to be ignoring the very real costs that a higher resolution screen will impose. Not just a higher manufacturing cost - which will either eat into Apple's margins, or create pricing opportunities for its rivals - but also costs in terms of battery life and processor cycles.
There is also the issue of fragmentation. There are currently about 70 million iPads in consumers hands using current resolution. A retina-class resolution is going to impose at least some level of additional coding on App developers.
There is the issue of content - and especially High Definition video content. Downloading a movie with four times the pixels (to say nothing of storing it) is going to take a lot longer than present resolution files do.
Lastly, one needs to ask if a "Retina" class display is going to be in Apple's best interest. Is it going to give them a unique marketing bullet point, one that rivals from Samsung or Acer cannot meet? The answer to that question is obviously not. Samsung - for all its faults - is probably a world leader in high-definition video display technology. Is it really in Apple's interest to get into a "spec war" with Samsung?
It certainly is possible that Apple has developed technological and engineering solutions to the issues I've raised. Maybe some of Apple's tremendous investments in capital goods over the past couple of years have secured for them a unique high-definition supply source. Maybe the next generation of GPU chips will ameliorate the processing burden super-HiDef video will create.
But I think its at least worth while considering the possibility that the next iPad won't have a retina class display. Otherwise I predict howls of outrage and disappointment from the armchair computer engineers who hang out at Mac Rumors.
I'm over 40 and cannot wait for Retina display on the iPad. I don't want to see pixels, I want to see a clean image, text, etc. I'm baffled that you do not see a difference between the pixelated book or a website on an iPad vs an iPhone 4 for example. For everyone that I know of that has an iPad/is planning to buy an iPad, higher-res display is in the top 3 wants. Heck, my own mother, whom I've been trying to switch from an old Powerbook to an iPad, looked at mine and said it was "fuzzy" when trying to read on it.