We got one. I never intended to use it as a writing tool, that's what I have a Macbook for. It's more for my wife, who--god bless her--is not a writer. She does light surfing, some email, and that's about it. She doesn't need a 15-inch Macbook for that.

I viewed it even before I bought it as a multimedia tool, and to my mind, it does that very well. If I needed to I can get email (I don't, I have an iPhone), surf the web, read a book (both through the iTunes Bookstore and the Kindle app), listen to music, watch a TV show or movie, play games. My wife was using it to listen to an NPR show she missed and I commented that she could have done that on the laptop, but she said the iPad was a lot easier to use.

I really do think that people who are viewing the iPad as a replacement technology for something may be missing the point. It's a niche technology that fits in between the smartphone and the laptop. The only real problem with it at the moment is it doesn't support Flash, so you can't go to Hulu.com or do slideshows on Flickr, but a geek friend of mine thinks by the end of the year most websites will drop flash for HTML5 anyway (I'm a little skeptical of his optimism).