Yesterday Steve Jobs introduced the world to Apple’s latest creation, the iPad. Say what you will about the name (you may have seen links to an old MADtv sketch for a completely different product of the same name), I believe Apple delivered a fantastic product. Does it live up to the hype? If it worked by mental telepathy instead of multi-touch, I don’t think it could have lived up to the hype. That’s the blessing and curse of Apple product launches.

While I expected the reactions both of the “gotta have it no matter what” fans and “gonna hate it no matter what” critics, I thought the general reaction would be something along the lines of “looks really cool but I’ll wait and try before I make up my mind.” To my surprise, the refrain I keep hearing is a rumbling disappointment that iPad is “only” a big iPod Touch.

The big revolution the iPhone brought into the mainstream was the idea that a smartphone shouldn’t be a phone with a few computer-like features. Rather it should be a pocket computer that among other things has a phone application. In fact, there was so much perceived value in this proposition that Apple realized that you could remove the phone from the iPhone and still have a product that lots of people would want. Thus was born the iPod Touch – the pocket computer that would replace your media player, give you access to thousands of applications and give you a great web and email experience.

That’s the innovation – pocket computing for the masses in a stylish device with a simple and intuitive user interface.

Personally, when I got my iPhone, my computing habits changed almost instantly. Very quickly I found that I did about 80% of my computing on my phone. I reserved booting up my Macbook Pro for media stuff and my PC for gaming.

But like many other people, I found there was a gap. For me specifically it was e-books. The phone screen was too small and the laptop too heavy and hot. So, I bought a Kindle for my “in-between” needs. It has it’s quirks but I am generally very happy with it. For other people, their “in-between” needs were met by small inexpensive basic laptops that came to be called netbooks.

As Steve Jobs pointed out in his presentation yesterday, the challenge of filling this “in-between” space between smartphones and laptops is what drove the design of the iPad.

So what would that device look like? It would give you a great web and email platform, play videos and music, let you update documents and presentations and read ebooks. It would be bigger than a smartphone and smaller that a laptop. It would be light and thin and have use a touchsreen for its primary interface. The screen would have to be big enough to give you a nice experience watching videos, browsing the web and typing on the virtual keyboard. Portable but not fit-in-your-pocket small. It would be built to leverage the scarcities of the mobile environment as strengths not to avoid them as weaknesses. Its underlying concept would not be a laptop with features removed, but rather a smartphone-like pocket computer with features added.

In other words, the perfect “in-between” device is a big iPod Touch. And if iPad isn’t seen as being a game-changer it’s because Apple already changed the game. Based on his opening remarks, it’s clear Steve Jobs intended iPad to further cement Apple’s identity as the company that defines how we do mobile computing.

And by filling the “in-between” ecological niche between smartphones and laptops with a big iPod Touch, I think he succeeded.