It works great; I've been doing it for awhile for my iPod Touch, and my friend has been doing it for his iPad already, and the results are fantastic. Other people on a different forum I frequent report that you can even get the file sizes down a little further by using the "Universal" preset in Handbrake when encoding for the iPad, without too much loss in quality.
At first I thought I had to actually extract the contents of the .dvdmedia file, by right-clicking and "showing package contents", then dragging that out. But Handbrake doesn't require that, it can read the .dvdmedia file by default. Very handy!
Those apps are a life saver, because I also use them to encode all the Barney, Little Einstein, and other cartoon DVDs we own for my daughter, who despite having not touched any for 24 hours finds a way to get peanut butter on everything. :lol: I put the .m4v files on an HP connected to my HDTV, and it works great.