Technically, the vast majority of consumer products these days "sleep" rather than shutting off. The PSP, iPad, iPhone, most other phones, most tablets, etc... You have to jump through some pretty hefty hoops to get them to completely power down completely. The PalmOS palmtops were the first ones that I used that followed this paradigm. What windows and windows laptops need to focus on is reducing battery usage when they're asleep, and waking up faster. This is tough with all of the legacy hardware that has to be completely shutoff and then reinitialized when it's powered back on. Achieving instant on will be something that will involve replacing most of the components of the system with ones that are designed to keep their state while using very little power. With newer devices this is easier because you're pulling all new components together from a pool of components designed to do exactly that. It's going to take hardware manufacturers to meet that goal, not merely software makers like Microsoft and the various Linux packagers.

How is the iPad a threat to Windows since 50% of the people who have one use Windows on it?

I didn't know you can run Windows on an iPad. Intereesting.

Maybe its 50% throws it out of a window! 

frogboy: i reckon tap into this app market and make it for useable for pc's too, not everyone has ipods... i know i dont, actually they kinda scare me!  There has to be something out of that market we can turn into profit for stardock....

No one can sells apps to the iPad except through the App Store.

I am quite happy with my Samsung Omnia II smartphone running Windows Mobile 6.5 this thing does all i want it to do and then some, and it fits in my pocket, if i want larger or faster i use my laptop or my desktop. Thats why i couldnt justify spending the money on an IPad, even though i could afford it and i adore gadgets it didnt fit in my gadget list. And the best part of my phone is it retails for 519.00 and i got it free, my contract was up with Verizon, i picked out the phone online (much cheaper than the stores) and it cost me NOTHING doesnt get any better than that

Agreed.  It isn't a threat to anything except iPod Touches.  I use an iPod Touch as my car media player.  

Since the iPad is still too small for web browsing, has no professional applications for working in the fields I work in, and is missing key features that would make is useful as a videophone, etc. etc., I can see only one use for me...watching movies on an airplane.  And I don't fly that often.  

I do.  And so did Steve Jobs.  Without violating my NDA, I can say for certain that the current incarnation of the iPad is NOT what Steve originally was shooting for in his long term plans.  His dream certainly WASN'T a big iPod Touch...

But as people have mentioned, battery life for a full OS is the current issue, along with OLED displays not ready for primetime at this size/price point.

You're not the target market.

http://chucksblog.emc.com/chucks_blog/2010/05/what-ipads-did-to-my-family.html

For content consumers and for those doing mostly consumption type activities on social networks, this will be perfect for them.

I'm still waiting for HP to release a slate-style device with WebOS.

Most consuming operations require you to produce: chat, answer, comment,... Those things are a pain on a device without a keyboard. Also, there's content that can't be consumed right now on an iPad (a vicepresident of Google pointed that pretty clearly today at Google IO talking about his young child browsing websites of cartoons that use a lot of flash ).

Chatting is a pain without a keyboard even at twitter style.

If I want to chat I'll go home and log on. There are too many things to do in the world.

I am not their target market.