Gruber has some good points, but I think in some ways he misses the forest for the trees. The iPad is essentially, at this point, a two-mode device. There is t

Gruber has some good points, but I think in some ways he misses the forest for the trees. The iPad is essentially, at this point, a two-mode device. There is the simple paradigm, screen-as-app mode inherited from the iPhone. Then, for power users, there is the multitasking paradigm with Flyover, Split Screen, Drag & Drop. The multitasking paradigm is not meant to co-exist with the simple one, and it is not meant to be discoverable. I agree with Gruber that there is work to do here to make it better, but iPad can't drop the simple paradigm, because many people use it that way. So anything more that the iPad offers has to build on top of and integrate with that paradigm. That is really a huge challenge. It's not often that challenges like that come along. In desktop computing, lots of things are un-intuitive or at least not intuitively discoverable, such as right-clicking for context menus or keyboard shortcuts. We all don't consider them that way because we are so used to them, and we almost never meet someone who hasn't ever had to interact with them the first time. I'd also argue that the simple paradigm iPhone and iPad offer has made computing more approachable to great swaths of people (not even considering things like cost, etc). Yes, iPad multitasking is not perfect. But I think they are at least on the right track, and I am thankful they have protected that approachability.