Come on people try to relax with the "get a gym membership" snarkiness. Apple products are great, but not perfect.
As someone who loves Apple products ands buys many of them,the iPad is a disappointing to me. One of the main reasons I bought an iPad was to use as a book and even a newspaper reader. To that extent it IS to heavy and unruly.
I'm wondering if our snarky friends have used the iPad to read an entire book? That is totally different than surfing websites, writing emails and the like - whether it's for 5 minutes or 5 hours.
Apple obviously positioned the iPad as a book reader. (See all the ebooks they are selling) So expecting an ebook reader to be "amazing" or "miraculous" - to use their words is not asking too much.
Yes, I do use my iPad to read books for long periods of time, and NO, I don't find it heavy. I just hold the iPad like a normal book, or I somewhat cradle the iPad against my forearms and just flip the pages as necessary.
The Apple iPad isn't supposed to be targeted primarily as a book reader. Yes, it can read books, but no, that doesn't means it's simply "a book reader." It's more than that. The iPad's a media consumption device, whether it's for books, music, art design, games, movies, etc. Most of the complaints on the forums are just people buying a product for the wrong reasons.
"I'm not happy with the lack of a camera"
"I only want to read books and it's too heavy"
"I can't play Starcraft II on it, why doesn't it have more RAM"
"I want retina display on my iPad"
They shouldn't have gotten an iPad in the first place. Typical Apple fanboys buying products and being unsatisfied with their purchase, because they were too stupid to understand the reality of the product, through over-expectations of an unknown product, and a forced demand of capabilities once they've realized it can't do what they expected it do.
If you really wanted "JUST" a book reader, get the damn Kindle and stop whining like a little girl about how "oh, the iPad's too heavy."