Like the rest of you, I waited with bated breath for news of Apple's newest magical mystery device.  And Tuesday's announcement did not disappoint.  As his events typically do, Jobs' intro of the iPad gave us a polished whirlwind tour of the new device, focusing on the object itself and its world of possibilities.  The general consumer press and Wall Street love this stuff.

I'm hardly as jaded as much of the blogosphere by Jobs' One More Thing Wonderstuff Revivals.  But Tuesday's keynote left as much unanswered for me as it whetted my appetite to actually see one of these things and rub its aluminum & aresenic-free glassiness against my cheek.

Here are a couple of thoughts and questions about what the iPad will and won't do for us when it actually hits the streets a little fewer than 60 days from today.

File systems and exchange - We've been promised iPad versions of Apple's lickable iWork productivity apps, including Pages (word processing) and Keynote (presentation building and presenting).  What we didn't see was how documents created on the iPad will sync with desk top machines and laptops.  

So I draft a Keynote at the office and have a flight to Walla Walla that evening.  The iPad promises editing capabilities on that Keynote along with the ability to present from the machine.  What will I do with that file when I get back to the office?  EMail it?  iChat it?  Or will Cupertino give us a better way to share those files within our own personal area network?  Which leads me to...

Proximity-based syncing and sharing - outside of Apple's iPhone native apps which sync seamlessly with their desktop counterparts (iTunes/iTunes, Photos/iPhoto, Calendar/iCal, Contacts/Addressbook), apps that create new content (recording apps specifically) require a desktop sync application that allows the new content to be moved from the iPhone's file system to that of the lap/desktop machine.  What I'd like to be able to do is know that pix that I shoot on my iPhone will sync with BOTH my laptop and iPad without my having to tell it to.  

In order for this to happen, an application like iSync will have to evolve yet again to provide easily configurable directional syncing.  Too, as users, we'll have to start thinking differently about "where" we put our self-created content and how we might want to be able to access it.

An incredible consumption device, but how much of a creation device? So take word processing - Will it be handled by an app?  (Yes.  Pages).  But what about people who use Word, OpenOffice, TextEdit and the trillion other ways to capture text and display it on a page?  Will Microsoft deliver Word for iPad that allows .docs to be opened, edited and saved?  Or would we look to something more cloud-based like Google Apps to provide a web-based application that allows me to write in a Google doc.  

And if this is the fix, what will my capabilities be when my entry-level WiFi-only iPad is running outside of a network?  How will I access cloud-stored documents?

In my little digital Nirvana, both the stuff that I create and the stuff that I own is available all the time, everywhere, regardless of the device I happen to be using.  My iTunes plays anywhere, anytime on either my iPhone, iPad or MacBook.  And it wouldn't care if I lived in a mixed ecosystem (Windows machine at work, iPad in my backpack and a Blackberry Storm in my pocket).  The copy that I drafted on my laptop machine at work would be available to me to edit on my iPad at home or, if I were in a pinch, on my iPhone.

Based on what the keynote told us, the iPad occupies a very legitimate ground between the desktop and the pocket.  But in order for it to become the magical device Apple envisions it to be, we'll have to learn more about how it will live in harmony with my other two platforms.