The main thing Apple did with the iPad was make it work without any major gotchas. Sure, you could have stuck a desktop CPU and desktop OS in a touchscreen device. Other people tried that. It wasn't appealing.

The iPad gave long battery life, a comfortable form-factor, solid usability and reliability, an impossibly low price point for such high-end hardware, and most importantly it was a tablet above all else. Every app becomes the machine. That's entirely different than carrying a desktop around in an iPad-sized box.

Be careful if you think this is simply dumbing down a desktop, because it shows you're missing the point.

What Apple did was remove all of the barriers that got in the way of a good tablet experience for individual consumers. In essence, they made the iPad an application platform instead of a general purpose computer.

They combined that with their amazing manufacturing and engineering prowess and created a real winner.

From my perspective, the iPad is a dumbed down device. I only have access to the underlying operating system via API, don't have an ability to directly access shared corporate resources that are interesting to me, and cannot run arbitrary software without alot of hassle.

Dumbed-down devices are fine -- i own and love my iPad. But they're fine until you need to do something that the vendor doesn't want you to do, and Apple is a vendor who likes to define a single "one true path" to do many things.