"Creating technology" is pretty broad. I've never used an iPad for more than a few seconds, so I'm not going to try and decode what he was referring to. I'm fairly certain he wasn't referring to art, though.

It's not a meme. The core of the problem is the forced sandboxing of apps and lack of any reasonable IPC mechanism built in. The individual apps are great, but the lack of ability to multitask holds you back.

That lack of featurism causes app developers to reinvent lots of basic stuff in their apps to get all the features they want. And sure, that happens on PCs too - but to a far lesser extent.

If you're familiar with the unix philosophy of making apps as filters, making them do one thing, and do it well - you'll understand how productive it can make you - and how there's no chance of reproducing that on a (non jailbroken) iPad.

And yes, I wasn't referring to art, but the software itself. Try creating an iPad app purely on the iPad - I wish you luck.

I don't think anyone is arguing that it's impossible to create anything worthwhile on an iPad, it is however obvious from the design of the product that whenever there was a conflict between power/features for creators and convenience for consumers that convenience won hands down every time. There's nothing wrong with that, there's clearly a big market for that.

On the other hand , describing the iPad as a good computer for application development because you can SSH to a remote server and run VIM seems a little stretched, by that standard the Nokia that I had in 2002 was a dev machine.

There's a reason that Apple continues to support and develop OSX.

The "using your fingertips on a glass screen" meme as the best thing in the world to interact with a computing device has to die, too. Using an iPad to create stuff is just like trying to paint with spaghetti instead of a brush. Of course, you can do it, but it's just not the best way/tool.