Okay, I know in advance I'm going to be flamed to a crispy finish for saying this but... magical might actually be a pretty accurate way of describing the iPad for some users. Before you grab the flamethrower let me explain:
The above Arthur C Clarke quote has often been used to get authors out of particularly sticky situations without resorting to technobable but it's also an interesting insight into the current world of computing. Show someone from... oh... 1980 a modern Macbook Pro and they'd not believe what it could do. Think about it for a second: a device with a screen less than an inch think that can play video files in quality better than the best movie theater of the day with sound seemingly out of nowhere streamed from a device on the other side of the planet and all without wires. It'd be witchcraft to them and the only reason us tech geeks don't see it as such is we've grown up with it, we saw that evolution (or just accepted it as default if you're young enough) and are comfortable with both technology and the actions need to work with it.
Now take a normal non-tech person today. They use computers but they don't really understand them. Heck, my dad uses one every day for work but as soon as he gets away from the instructions he's lost. My mother-in-law wants to learn 'em but can't get past the abstraction layer of mouse input and the mess of single, double and right click interactions. It's not just older people either, I've had to help uni students through exactly the same issues.
What if you could wrap up all the really cool stuff you can do with computers (web, e-mail, games, photos, video etc etc etc) and put it in a device and form factor that was both intuitive AND removed almost all of the maintenance tasks a regular computer would need? For those who currently struggle to get along with 'traditional' desktop computers... wouldn't that seem like magic to them?
Just a thought of course...