The iPad has touched a nerve in the geek community.

Judging by comments on Wired.com and elsewhere, many people are outraged that Apple would try to foist a less-capable, dumbed-down device on an unsuspecting public. Thanks to clever marketing, these people point out, Apple has persuaded us to spend $500 and more for something that’s less capable and more restrictive than a netbook computer costing half as much.

Those critics are right. But their rage is misplaced.

The iPad is the ultimate media consumption device: It’s just a screen. It is a more beautiful and immersive screen than photos suggest, though. You really do have to hold one in your hand to appreciate how tangible it makes the digital world. Thanks to the in-plane switching LCD and the fast processor under the hood, photos, videos and web pages all come to life, in rich, vivid colors and with a presence that I’ve never seen on any laptop.

Apart from that, there isn’t that much that’s innovative about the iPad, technologically speaking. The rest of Apple’s innovations have to do with packaging, marketing, and a retail experience that’s almost frightening in its attention to detail.

But then, good customer experience, clever marketing, and a fast, bright screen that you can take with you may be just what Hollywood needs.

Because that’s who the iPad is made for: Hollywood. And Madison Avenue, Nashville, Fleet Street, Burbank and all the other places where mass media is produced. (Why do you think Stephen Colbert was one of the first to get an iPad? And why do you think the iPad ad debuted during the Oscars?)

In short, it’s a consumption device, not a production device. Sure, you can make short comments using the on-screen keyboard, but if this were your only device for writing and publishing blog posts, you’d want to fling it out a window.

In other words, the iPad is not ideal for the kind of interactive, distributed storytelling that the web has spawned: in a word, blogging. It’s not likely to do well as a photo or video editing tool or programming device either, though I haven’t tested that hypothesis.

The very thing that makes the iPad so good as a lean-back media device — its lack of a keyboard — is exactly the thing that makes it poorly suited to banging out thoughtful essays, outraged screeds or pointed corrections.

But you know what? That might be OK.

The iPad’s not taking away my keyboard, after all; it’s just another device. Sometimes the kind of passive entertainment it affords is exactly what I want after a long day at my keyboard. While its onscreen keyboard is no great shakes, I can type out a comment or a tweet on it if I feel the need to, and I can always walk over to my laptop if I decide I need to compose a full blog post to rebut some idiot.

As an entertainment device, it’s the next best thing to television. Actually, it’s kind of like television 2.0.

After a day with the iPad, I kind of like that. It’s no more, and no less, than Apple promised. For what it is, it’s a brilliant device: fun, dopamine-releasing, immersive, and easy on the eyes.

If I were to choose between a television and an iPad, I’m pretty sure I’d pick the iPad.

Thanks to by Brian X. Chen for the photo above, and some help sorting out my thoughts in this piece.

Check out this video, where I give a 3-minute first look at the iPad’s high and low points:

But I can’t believe that Steve Jobs is going to stop there.

Brian X. Chen and I predicted on Tuesday evening that Apple’s big announcement would go beyond the iPad, and include the announcement of a major, multi-platform content store centered on iTunes.

We were wrong. Wednesday’s announcement was all about the iPad, and nothing else.

But the door is still open for Apple to make a broader content play, and here’s why it makes sense — and why it may be inevitable.

Apple already sells apps, music, video and podcasts through iTunes. Already, iTunes includes fairly robust support for sharing the content you download with other computers on your home network, and of course you can play music, video and podcast on your iPhone or iPod touch as well as your computer. In other words, iTunes is a pretty good media delivery system. In many ways, it’s broken, and it needs to be fixed, but it works.

Apple will shortly begin selling e-books. They’re in the EPUB format, which is fairly rudimentary and doesn’t include much support for formatting or layout, but it’s a start. Also, it’s unclear whether those books will be readable on anything except the iPad. Let’s assume that even if they are iPad-only to start, Apple quickly comes up with some way of reading those books via iTunes on your computer and on your iPhone, because it needs to do that to remain competitive with Amazon’s Kindle.

Apart from those formats — AAC/MP3, Quicktime video, EPUB books and iPhone/iPad apps — iTunes doesn’t offer much support to content producers.

But there’s an end-run around iTunes, for app developers who are frustrated with Apple’s slow and arbitrary-seeming approval process. It’s call web development, and it’s why Apple will soon have to expand the iTunes menu.

Ambitious web developers are discovering that they can create web-centric apps using HTML5 and JavaScript that have surprising speed and interactivity. Check out the Google Voice web app for a clear illustration of this principle. It looks and feels more like a native app than anything I’ve seen recently.

The more developers start going this route, the more money Apple is going to be leaving on the table, because those web apps won’t be sold through iTunes. They’ll be given away or sold through a variety of other payment mechanisms, none of which give a cut to Apple.

Eventually, Apple’s going to offer a way for web app developers to sell subscriptions or one-off access to their web apps via iTunes.

It won’t be mandatory, because there’s no way for Apple to close off the independent web developers completely without messing with the web standards they seem clearly to be supporting. But there will be a powerful incentive for developers, which is that they can take advantage of a built-in micropayment system and the installed base of 125 million iTunes users.

When that happens, it will be a subtle but powerful shift in the economics of the web. App producers will then have the option of creating iPad/iPhone native apps in Objective C, or of producing web apps using HTML5, JavaScript and H.264.

If they go the latter route, they’ll have the option of deploying content on the public web, and collecting money however they can.

Or they will be able to deploy HTML content and web apps via iTunes, letting Apple take care of billing and settlement in return for a 30% cut.

There will be cries that Apple is creating a walled garden, or splitting the web into pieces. And they’ll be right, to a point. But the fact is, there’s no reason that all web content has to be delivered via HTTP from a public, free web server. It could be delivered, page by page and web app by web app, via iTunes.

If I were a web developer or a content producer, I’d be looking at ways of creating rich, immersive experiences using web technologies. Because even if my prediction is wrong and you can’t at some point sell those through iTunes, the iPad is going to make experiences like that compelling enough that you will be able to sell them, through one channel or another.

This article also subsequently appeared on wired.com.