I up wound picking up a used ipad 16GB wifi not too long after I posted my reply below(thank you bing 8% cashback!)
For us around the house it has replaced the netbook: great for "coffee table" browsing, looking up recipes. My 2.5 year old plays games on it, watches movies I have ripped or from Netflix, watches Dr Seus animated books and uses some fun educational apps such as word & phrase flashcards.
Besides having watched "Up" about 25 times
it is amazing for me to watch my son easily navigate the ipad and open the apps he wants. This is a case where Apple's simple interface is good...anyone can figure it out quickly.
Even when I'm home on my main computer I have the ipad propped up and use for such things as viewing my Twitter/Facebook feeds (check out Flipbook!), weather or keeping email/calendar/task maanagement open on it.
Thanks to apps such as logmein, vnc and rdp I can take this on vacation instead of a laptop and still get work done if needed.
The battery life is amazing...I did take it to work one day as an experiment to see if i could get away with using it instead of laptop(used logmein and rdp) and after using for about 9 hours it still has 33% battery left!
I did want an Android tablet but glad I got this instead. The reason I say this is the apps written specifically for the ipad really make it shine. It will be awhile before a decent android tablet comes out and then even longer for apps to take advantage of what hopefully will be higher resolution screens than 854x480.
For me it was $450 well spent(used) as we use it everyday...and more ipad specific apps are coming out every week.
Im not an Apple fanboy(Droid1 is my phone) but I do use whatever works best for me...
RichP
IMO i dont think storage capacity on these media consumption devies is all that critical...you do need enough storage to say make it through a 5-7 hour flight if you are using for movies...so for many people 16GB - 32GB will be fine. Do you really need your entire itunes library with you at all times? Plus as in-flight wifi because more common you'll be able to stream media during your flight.
I myself am tempted by the ipad but mainly would like a 7" android tablet that has access to the android market and is running at least Android 2.1.
The ability to run Logmein for remote support without a laptop is a big plus.
Would have picked up the new Archos 7 Home Tablet for $200 but it has restive touch, doesn't have access to the Android Market and the reviews so far are so-so.