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No company can generate as much hype around a product launch as Apple. But that's perfectly OK because no company is also nearly as successful at producing a new product that can justify almost any level of excitement that precedes it.

They don't do it with every product launch, but bloody hell: they've done it with the iPad.

It's a computer that many people have been wanting for years: a slim, ten-hour computer that can hold every document, book, movie, CD, email, picture, or other scrap of data they're ever likely to want to have at hand; with a huge library of apps that will ultimately allow it to fulfill nearly any function; and which nonetheless covers the dull compulsories of computing (Mail, the web, and Microsoft Office-style apps) so well that there will be many situations in which this 1.5-pound slate can handily take the place of a laptop bag filled with hardware and accessories.

In fact, after a week with the iPad, I'm suddenly wondering if any other company is as committed to invention as Apple. Has any other company ever demonstrated a restlessness to stray from the safe and proven, and actually invent things-

It might occur to you that we've seen tablets before and that we'll see many more of them in 2010. At this year's Consumer Electronics Show, we discovered a buzzing hive filled with Tegra-based tablets running the Android OS. Any day now, some little kid will whack it with a stick and they'll be all over the place.

Well, I'm here to tell you that in fact, we haven't seen tablets before. And maybe the iPad is the only true tablet we'll get in 2010. The hardware we've seen in years past, (and what we're likely to see in these Android devices) are laptop computers with the keyboard section broken off. They're not fundamentally touch-based computers, they're the products of old thinking. When Apple looks at a fingertip, they see a warm, living thing that can feel. They don't see a poor substitute for a mouse.

That's the problem facing all of these other tablets. They've never stopped and looked at this device as a brand-new thing, and thrown out all of the design elements that they've only included out of force of habit. These other tablets have a feature list a mile long ("Is just one camera enough- The hell with it: let's put in five, including two that face each other.") That's easy. The challenge they all seem to be avoiding is to restrict the device to features that are truly relevant to tablet computing. Otherwise, these added hardware and software features only create greater instability and user confusion, and turn this tablet into something that you'd never, ever use if you had any alternative.

What happens when computer designers lets go of every instinct that's hardwired into their DNA, and starts practically from scratch-

They create the iPad. The iPad user experience is instantly compelling and elegant. It's not every computer and every function. It's a computer that's designed for speed, mobility, and tactile interaction above all other considerations.

The most compelling sign that Apple got this right is the fact that despite the novelty of the iPad, the excitement slips away after about ten seconds and you're completely focused on the task at hand ... whether it's reading a book, writing a report, or working on clearing your Inbox. Second most compelling: in situation after situation, I find that the iPad is the best computer in my household and office menagerie. It's not a replacement for my notebook, mind you. It feels more as if the iPad is filling a gap that's existed for quite some time.

This month marks the exact ten-year anniversary of this column. To take this gig, I had to turn down an offer to be another paper's full-time movie critic ... a dream job if there ever was one. But in the end, I looked at the movies that I knew were going to be released in the next few years, and the tech stuff that was just over the horizon. And I realized that I was far more excited about writing about the tech stuff on that list.

Hardware like the iPad confirms that I made the right choice.