The beauty of the iPad, however, actually IS the fact that it represents a “grown-up” iPhone. The iPad represents the fact that the Apple Corporation has realized that the entire future of human community and society is moving into “the Cloud”. Apple has realized that the future isn’t in personal and private physical storage and clunky personal machines – the future is Cloud storage and server compounds surrounded by small. portable entry machines that have complete access to all the Cloud has to offer, rather than the somewhat limited capabilities of present smartphones and netbooks. The iPad has the potential to be a “Complete iPhone”.
As for the educational system, it is already finding use for the Cloud and the Kindle. But what is needed for a reliable “virtual” educational system is redundancy, backup, and globalization. Eventually, there will be one global Educational Cloud, composed of a network of semi-private vspn clouds.
Physical classrooms will vanish and the campus real estate will be used for server storage, vspn environments, and entertainment or athletic facilities. Further, this global educational system will be entirely linked to the global workplace environment.
There will be true “lifelong education” with no need for breaks or final “graduation”. Parents will register their children into university at birth, and people will spend their entire lives in the system via access devices, both learning and contributing. Even after death, a person’s contributions will live on in the cloud. Students will continue earning higher and higher degrees, but there will no longer be a final graduation and severence from the system. Tuition will become just another form of lifelong taxation.
All of this will be tied to the global workplace – perhaps even the future of physical labor will become entirely robotic with humans administering to it all via the “iPads” of the future.

The iPad, to me, is just a realization that the human species is really in the larval state of becoming “Borg”. And due to the harsh laws of physics and economic reality – resistance really is “futile” if the human species intends to survive much longer.
We are budding Borg…and Apple has started building the Hive.