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well. what i meant was if you walked up to a sales clerk in an electronics store and said "i want an e-book reader" and they pushed you at an ipad vs. a sony or kindle or nook. there is a big difference between and e-book reader, and a device that will display e-books. my laptop (and desktop for that matter) will display electronic books, but i wouldn't call either of those an e-book reader either.
as for a usb port for jump drives, each drive can require its own drivers, so we're back to the whole driver issue. then there's the matter of file-system support. FAT? FAT32? HFS? HFS+? NTFS? the iPad uses HFS for it's native filesystem, so that is built in, but cameras and the like use FAT or FAT32. filesystem drivers for those would need to be developed. not too hard, but still work. then you'd need a "finder" type application. they do exist for jailbroken devices, so they have been developed. but suddenly your grandmother has to figure out how to navigate a file system and remember what directory she put those pictures in. applications need APIs to access the whole filesystem. you've also introduced a vector for things like buffer-overuns for people looking to do naughty things with your iDevice. again, all of this takes away from the whole "it just works" operation Apple is trying to keep.
i'm very curious how the camera kit is going to work. i plan on picking one up (avid photographer here) whenever they become available. but have you noticed the photos application has no organization ability at all. you can't create new folders and move pictures around between them, something i totally wish it did (on the iPhone, which actually has a camera, as well as on the iPad). i can take several hundred photos in a day very easily, is it just going to keep appending them to the one camera roll? that "stack" of photos is going to be miles high, and useless to navigate. hopefully we'll see an updated photo application when that kit goes live.
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