Ergo, the machine that a hundred creators are most likely to have in common, is one that consumes well. It seems the only thing we should logically expect is consumption and popularity to go hand in hand.

But what exactly about the iPad acts as a break on creation?

It isn't suited to composing and editing large blocks of text out-of-the-box; but only a couple forms of Art require that.

Notably, the iPad is an arguably better machine for the creation of every art you explicitly called out, save coding.

Does a cook need a keyboard and mouse in the kitchen? Seems a quick-reference that can sit in a recipe-book-holder and doesn't require putting down the butcher knife would be welcome.

Wouldn't a dancer be better off with a machine that is easily picked up, put down, carried through a routine at half-speed and can naturally scrub through an instructional video? (My wife has already used my iPad to do exactly this.)

Wouldn't a singer suitably benefit from an iPad on a music stand, showing instant pitch-feedback (via its microphone) and live-scrolling note chart?

And clearly drawing is more-easily done on a tablet than with a mouse.

As a big fan of creation, I'm downright excited that such a device has come to market that gets more cruft out of the way and brings computing to the natural habitats of other artists.

That only developers with serious tools can code for it, and only at Apple's pleasure certainly isn't ideal. But that isn't so huge a roadblock and the up-side is that we're enabling all these other arts.

You mean like one of these? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book

But seriously, think about it. Why would a "media consumption" device become popular? It might be because "passive consumerism" is popular. The iPad does what most people already do with laptops and desktops, which they did before with TVs and VCRs and CD players and game consoles and newspapers and magazines and books.

It's just technology conforming to what people actually do, which historically seems to work out in everybody's favor--moreso than trying to change human nature to fit an ideal, at least--in the form of new capabilities and the cognitive surplus to use them.