I am at a conference and just got to play with the iPad 2 for the first time. I must say that I'm not blown away impressed. Here are my thoughts afer 30 minutes of play time:
iPadd is boring. Truly it is. With my beautiful weather live wallpaper flowing in the background vs. her iPad 2 wallpaper, the WOW factor at first glance the Xoom wins hands down.
Overall quickness/snappyness/smoothness goes to the iPad2. I think I can explain it away as I have 3 fullscreens of widgets and live wallpaper going and she has a screen full of inactive icons. But whatever the reason when i scroll from screen to screen, the iPad2 was flawless, smooth and quick. My Xoom can be a bit lagy at times. Not enough to make me sorry that I bought it rather than the iPad, but it is noticable.
Screen beautyat 100% coin flip. Both are beautiful to my eye and for where I surfed and played I couldn't really tell much of a difference.
Speed of browser also a toss up. Depended on what website I tried to load, both were literallly 3-5 seconds apart.
Feel in my hand iPad 2 was a bit lighter in my hand but not enought to tell the difference if I wasn't sitting there holding both and and trying to feel the differnece.
User interface, I willl go with my Xoom. I was shocked at this. I truly expected the iPad's UI to wipe my Honeycomb off the map. It didn't. I love how honeycome does not have any physical buttons on the front. I love that honeycomb has the rotating Home, Multi-tasking menu and back arrows on screen. I found myself fumbling with that button on the front of the iPad. Then again this was the first time I've handled anything Apple in 5 years. As someone that is "new" to the Apple interface, not impressed.
With the integration of pure OS driven apps it's personal preference. If you have invested the past 10 years buying stuff through the iStore I can see why you would want to go with Apple's products. For someone like me that hated Apple due to DRM music 5 years ago and stopped buying their crap then, I invested my time and money into Android Market and Google apps. Now I'm neck deep in Android. Therefore, I love gmail, picasa, docs, and especially maps. I can see where iPhoto is better, but I don't use photo editors on my tablet, iMovie is worlds better than Movies on my Xoom, but I don't edit movies on my Xoom. If you have an Apple computer and you use those services there, you need an iPad2. MOST of the world does NOT compute on an Apple computer. Windows is still king. Maps rocks integrated into my Xoom, it felt clumsy in the iPad, not nearly as smooth. I'd liken it to the lag that I experienced when scrolling screens on the Xoom vs. the iPad2. It felt that laggy and unnatural.
The keyboard on the iPad was large and nice. I really liked it. Typing felt more natural than the Xooms keyboard. I know you can switch but I was looking stock to stock. Google needs to get on the ball with BlindType and get this on Honeycomb, then it will blow Apple away there.
I'm leaving things like Flash off of the discussion, those things are obvious and have been talked to death.
After my first hands on experience, I'm glad I chose my Xoom. It fits me. It's what Ineed and what I like. No regrets here.
