Most people have PC's at the office or in school's for that. And with the keyboard dock I found the iPad pretty good for wordprocessing (and I prefer doing presentations on it).
Of course at that point it gets annoying to have to take your hand and reach over to the screen all the time , so you probably want to plug in some sort of pointing device..
Now it becomes a hassle to carry all of these docks and accessories around with you so you think "gee , I wish somebody could invent something that combined my screen, keyboard and mouse into one unit..."
Another point to bear in mind is that whilst people will have computers at work and at school a great many people , especially students will want to do work from home.
People do not just base their requirements on what they need 99% of the time, but rather on what they forsee their possible needs might be.
Let's take cars for example, how many people do you know that own medium to large size cars with 5 seats and a trunk where for 90% of their daily driving the car only contains the driver , possibly one passenger and an empty trunk?
Jiggy, I completely respect this point of view, but understand you are arguing from the base assumption that people have to spend a lot of time doing that complex processing.
To exploit your analogy (cars are always good for that :-) how many people own trucks these days? There is always a market for a truck, its the best selling unit of Ford's inventory, but people who only occasionally move stuff or carry stuff often will borrow or rent a truck when needed rather than own one)
The other interesting part of this conversation is the conflation of cause and solution. Your point 'especially students will want to work from home' is particularly salient. When I was a student the PC didn't exist, I still worked fine from home :-) But more importantly as the presence of PC's in the home grew, teachers gave students the opportunity to do work on them rather than say writing it out long form, etc. But as tablets become common at home and with students, and especially tablet based text books, the opportunity to provide even better tools for students is possible.
Imagine a world where your history home work is to write an essay on some topic in the text book that is also on your tablet. Writing an essay is pretty trivial mechanically, you don't mouse a lot and you can do the whole thing even from a soft keyboard.
And this comment for me really sums it up : "People do not just base their requirements on what they need 99% of the time, but rather on what they forsee their possible needs might be."
This is spot on, and there are many people who are looking at tablets and deciding that it can cover even their foreseeable needs. And that, for me at least defines, the term 'Post PC', when something other than a PC can meet the extant and foreseeable needs of someone with respect to information communication and manipulation.
I think it depends on what you define as "Post PC" , whether we really talking about "post wintel" or "post keyboard and mouse".
I think the precision and speed advantage you get from a proper keyboard and mouse setup vs a touchscreen, especially when you consider how cheap both of these items are will mean that they are around for some time even if it as an optional add-on rather than a core part of the whole interface.
I see the "post pc" as more of a rethink of the PC minus the general historical baggage that various versions of Windows etc have carried with them for last 20 or so years.
What I think people are really clambering for is a better user experience from their software.
Let's take the filesystem as an example.
Years ago it made sense to have an OS with the concept of files and folders being exposed to the user.
Why? Because you needed to be able to group your stuff together, either things for a particular project or because they were of a particular file format (word documents , spreadsheets etc).
You would also have "drive letters" which told you whether it was on the "C drive" (inside the computer) or the "A drive" (portable). This is no longer important since we can trivially sync most things to the internet regardless of where the bits are physically stored. In fact Unix doesn't even have the concept of drive letters at all.
File formats can now easily be replaced by Mime types and meta info since fast SSDs and indexes can be used to search either the device itself or cloud storage very quickly. This means it is easy to have an app that loads and immediately provides a list of all the documents which it can work with.
The only requirement that is left is the "grouping", folders are pretty bad for this because you can only group in one dimension. A better system might be some form of "tagging" for example tagging as "work" or "my project" etc.
By removing the filesystem from the user's consciousness you have already massively improved usability and I think this is probably the biggest thing that has made the iPad so easy to use because it essentially turns the install process for an application into a 1 stage thing. Combine this with having updates automatically install silently in the background and an application ecosystem built around the idea of the internet and web as a first class citizen in the OS rather than an extension of it and you have a very seamless experience.
The physical "input into the device" landscape though I see as something blown open and I really don't think there needs to be one dominant paradigm here.
