An Ipad it is not. The white one is a pretty fair cheap tablet, the colored ones - depends on which ones.
www.slatedroid.com has a lot of helps for the novel white and some help for the others. We have two Novels and love them.
Apps are available in numerous places other than app market and you can run app market with a minor addition to the system.
The Novel is not a cell phone, android was a cell phone software so yes there are some limitations. Novel is not the only tablet that has similar/different limitations.