I still have a working eMate 300. Every now and then I start it up and play around a bit. It's neat to see how someone of it still lives on in iPad OS with the Apple Pencil.
It also seems to have a high-contrast reflective screen that you could use in broad daylight, something that challenges even my rather bright MacBook Pro.
As you note the iPad is something of a successor to the Newton both in hardware (e.g. ARM CPU, Apple Pencil) and interface (e.g. shape recognition/drawing, long press.)
Apple apparently prototyped larger Newton tablets (VideoPad) as well as pen-based Mac OS devices (PenLite) but never brought them to market. Though macOS does work as a pen based system if you plug in a Cintiq, or an iPad with Sidecar.
Thomas Meyerhoffer designed the eMate 300. Jony designed the second-generation Newton MessagePad, the Newton MessagePad 110.
(If HN didn't have its stupid edit locks I could edit it to read "say what you will about 1990s Apple.")
In any case, the eMate looks like an amazing design and now I want to see more Meyerhoffer designs!
I'd still like to hear more about Thomas Meyerhoffer though.
I can’t help but think it would make a really good Raspberry Pi casemod, but it feels like sacrilege to gut a working device.
Incidentally, if anyone has any broken eMates I’d be interested…