This risks being the most fatuous post ever, because my expertise on this subject is limited to five minutes in an Apple Store playing with the iPad, not actually buying it, like a fair amount of folks have. This is not a review, but an attempt to convey a gut-level response I had to a product that I’ve been trying to approach with as much skepticism as possible.

Simply put, you have to touch this thing to understand. It put a smile on my face.

I’ve heard the commentators dismissing it as a big iPod Touch, or a poor man’s notebook, but only by interacting with it can you appreciate the novelty of the iPad.

With the iPad, you feel like you’re truly manipulating an environment in a way that the iPhone can’t even really begin to approximate. The sense of control this thing gives you is striking.

The screen real estate is about four times the size of the iPhone. That means the familiar pinches, zooms, and swipes result in four times the feedback. This is an enormously satisfying feeling.The closest analogy I can think of is a maxim of UI design for the web. Of these two, which button would you rather click on?

If you said the big one, you’re well on your way to understanding the power of the iPad.

The same basic gestures give you an outsized sense of control. The screen size, which would be seen as quite limiting if it were tethered to a netbook and downright pathetic next to Apple’s 27-inch displays, seems much bigger than it actually is because of the direct power you wield over the touch interface. (It’s a much more intimate experience as a result.) On the iPhone, a small screen size also seems much bigger than it is, but at best you’d call it serviceable. Enough to make it okay, but not great, as a gaming device. The iPad by comparison seems humungous.

A direct comparison back to PCs also doesn’t work. PCs work by pressing buttons, and controlling this little avatar known as a cursor. Your interaction with the operating system is by design indirect. A virtual representation of your hand motions is what controls the OS, not you. Any tablet built around this frame of reference was designed to fail, because of the mixed metaphor inherent in a touch interface combined with OSes built around virtual mouse clicks. It took the iPhone to update our frame of reference about computing interfaces, and iPad blows it wide open by leveraging effortless gestures into huge changes on a decent sized display.

This is why I think most people are responding so positively to the iPad. For me, just zooming in on a map was so, so much better than on an iPhone.