I suspect a lot of people ONLY have the devices, and have not spent the extra few hundred on any kind of backup. A Time Capsule? A third-party remote backup service? An external HD? That costs MONEY!

I personally haven't plugged my iPad into my Mac in ages. Then again I've also made damn sure it's backing itself up to the cloud. I'm not sure if this is the default setting. It should be, IMHO.

(And I gotta say, it's really freeing to know that even if all my possessions are destroyed, I will have lost at most a day or so of work.)