Is Apple's iPad the pioneer?
Well, kind of, but let’s sort it out. The fact of the matter is that there are different types of what we may call tablets.
There exist double-screen booklets that fold like a book and have no physical keyboard; convertible tablets looking like common netbooks with a touchscreen display and the physical keyboard which rotates and folds making a tablet look as a slate; and hybrid tablets bodily looking almost the same as convertible but with a detached keyboard.
The iPad represents the slate category of tablet devices. And it’s the first quantity-produced slate tablet for the wide audience, indeed. That’s what’s so “revolutionary” about it. A “slate” means a tablet with a touchscreen display and with no physical keyboard. The iPad can be called a web-tablet or a media-tablet, as well. It means that this device is mainly intended for media consumption and web-browsing. That’s why it runs a mobile OS and has a plain user interface so that any person, even a child or an old man, can easily get to work on it. And beyond doubt, it does the iPad a lot of credit.