It's actually a little easier than that - your iPhoto work on the iPad gets saved to your iCloud account (for free) and will automatically show up in iPhoto on your Mac. You won't have to do the "connecting" part, at least not with wires...
Ok now I'm a bit confused because these two responses seem to be conflicting.
Response 1: My understanding is that I do all the work in iPhoto and it auto syncs through iCloud back to my Mac
Response 2: After doing all of the work in iPhoto there appears some sort of option to export my work to the camera roll and then I connect my iPad to my Mac and sync it via cable.
Sorry that my understanding is so off, I'm so used to having devices that don't' work together (Zune, Mac, TouchPad, etc.) and I'm hoping to have some sort of continuity between my iPad and my Macs.
You can export to Photostream, maybe that's what Dave meant? But it's not like you can pick a photo from iPhoto on your Mac, edit it on iOS and have it sync back.
Based on the user feedback, it's actually quite awful. No surprise there since iMovie is awful as well. But then again Apple is the one that also gave us the incredibly lackluster iOS.
the answer is no, you cannot use your iPad to organize your photos. iPhoto for iPad is a companion application. You sync from OSX to iOS, not the other way around. So if you use the desktop iPhoto to do all your organization, you can sync it to iOS iPhoto and see it all very nicely, but there is still no Apple app which provides for organizing photos in iOS. The iPad is still hand cuffed to the desktop.
Based on the user feedback, it's actually quite awful. No surprise there since iMovie is awful as well. But then again Apple is the one that also gave us the incredibly lackluster iOS.