Better than Paper and Pencil?
As beautiful as the iPad is (and as vaporously strategic as the pundits predict it to be) the functions demo'd so far are sleek but kind of pedestrian (with the exception of Brushes). It seems to offer the same kind of child-ish experience that the OSX mail program does. Something that drives me to distraction (Apple, if you give me resize handles on embedded images, really, I won't hurt myself).
This however promises something quite different. If it works, as fictionally demo'd, I think it could really be something that improves upon raw paper and pencil for ideation and creative thinking: Is it real? Apparently not - it's just a "concept car" ... but hopefully the iPad has ruffled Microsoft enough that they get serious about pushing it out of the lab, or out of the UX designers heads, whichever the case may be. Windows Phone 7 series is a good sign...but I've seen pretty designer videos before, like the one above, that come to nothing. And finally, Microsoft, please don't invent some new UI platform for this - that's what your Silverlight investments are for.
