Based on all the details Wednesday, I’ve written an iPad analysis report that clients should be able to dive into later today. The bottom line: no matter how much you may think Apple ran its hype machine this week, the iPad will be a force to be reckoned with. Why? Because Apple has a unique vision for Anywhere devices and the marketing muscle to back it up. If you have comments or disagreements after reading it, please send them.

Meanwhile, a number of questions and objections to the iPad have popped up online, and given that I’m one of only about 500 people who has used an iPad for a half-hour or so, I thought I’d repond to them here. So without further todo:

Isn’t iPad just a big iPod touch?

Yup, that’s exactly what the iPad is. But before you dismiss it as a snoozer, I think you’ll find that it’s the execution as much as the concept that wows you (to say nothing of the fact that more than 20 million iPod touches have been sold to date). Specifically:

Why doesn’t the iPad have a SD card slot, USB ports, floppy drives, or PS2 mouse support?

Apple’s design philosophy is that its products are defined as much by what they leave out as much as what they put in. Leaving out unneeded technology lets them move the designs ahead faster, make the user experience more differentiated (for better or worse) and create fewer distractions for the user. At the same time, it allows its developers to get rid of a lot of legacy support issues. Apple’s philosophy for iPad is that Bluetooth and the 30-pin iPod dock connector provide access to keyboards, video, I/O, flash memory peripherals, and a host of other add-on devices. Adding more interfaces would just make the device less elegant, not more.

Why won’t Apple support Flash?

This is admittedly a philosophical issue, but I buy their thinking. Apple’s issue is that Adobe controls Flash, and it has some design decisions within it that don’t work well with Apple’s designs. Further, Flash technology creates black holes in the technology of the Web, raising havoc with everything from URLs to Google’s Pagerank algorithm of counting links. Finally, HTML5 addresses most of the need for Flash video and scripting in an open, Internet standard way, and Apple has spent significant energy implementing that standard. And as noted in the answer to the previous question, Apple has no interest in hitching its newest shiny creation to a proprietary technology it thinks is headed for the dumpster; it defines its products as much by what it leaves out as puts in.

What about multitasking! I need multitasking!

Apple’s trying to drive a completely new user interface model with IPad and iPhone. It takes some getting used to, but if you are complaining about all the “Pro” features Apple left out, you probably aren’t the target audience for the product. Your children and your parents probably are, but you aren’t. See this well-argued screed for more details.

You’re clearly in love with Apple. Most analysts are disappointed in iPad.

Yeah, I’m a big admirer of Apple, mostly because they do world-class consumer design and marketing, unlike many famous technology companies who sell tech for tech’s sake, and only pretend to care about those things. I’m happy to criticize them when they get things wrong, but frankly, they haven’t been doing a lot of that in recent years. See last quarter’s earnings report for proof — if they keep this up, they’ll pass Microsoft in market cap in the next year or two.

But there’s a world of difference between reading about the iPad and using it. Given that I was one of fewer than 15 industry analysts who were present at the event and have actually used the iPad, a lot of the doubters just don’t have any way to properly gauge the experience that Apple is delivering with this device.

The analogy I’d draw is that the difference between looking at a catalog description of a butter-soft cashmere sweater and actually trying it on in the store — the look, feel, and experience of the real product is what seduces you. That opinion doesn’t come from just me—check out this article by Steven Fry where his hands-on iPad experience made him a convert. With 283 Apple stores world-wide, Apple will have the opportunity to convert 50 million store visitors a year to its new Anywhere device with an in-depth personal experiences.

My bottom line: iPad is the product that Steve Jobs believes is the most important thing he’s ever done. Anyone who picks up an iPad knows what I’m talking about; everyone else is critiquing the catalog description, not the real thing.