Okay, I’m a Mac Fanboy. I want Steve Jobs every whim to be successful. I want his random thoughts to make oodles of money, so my Mac future is secure and filled with delight.

Unfortunately, I was not wowed by the iPad presentation. I was expecting, I don’t know, an extra special something. That feeling I had when he introduced the iPhone.

But that’s silly. He’s already introduced the iPhone. The new technology, and the new approach are already here. This is the natural progression. The iPad is not, as some would call it, a big iPod touch, but a bridge.

Not a bridge between a smart phone and a laptop (sorry, Steve), but a bridge between the computer users and the non-computer users. The internet for the computer-phobic. The people that think the Kindle looks too complicated. And trust me, they are out there in droves.

Statistics can be misleading: “households with computers” does not mean that everyone in the house uses the computer. Even in a house with a geek, there are the people the geek tends to: the mothers, fathers, grandparents (And the geek resents it – but that’s the subject of a different blog post).

They’ll want one of these. Despite it’s shortcomings. They don’t even understand the shortcomings. They haven’t yet thought of video conferencing. They don’t know what Flash is. They will marvel at what it can do, not what is missing. Steve shouldn’t have held the event for the press and the gamers and the Mac fans – he should have brought in a few elder care centers, and people who have never purchased a computer. He shouldn’t have crafted his careful explanation of filling in the missing product line, but just said flat out, “it’s a computer for everyone else.” The computer for people who don’t know who Steve Jobs is, or the difference between MacOS, Windows and Linux. They want to enjoy the stuff we keep telling them is amazing, but can’t get over the computer learning curve to experience.

Case in point: my mother-in-law. She went nuts when she saw the news reports after the announcement. She gushed about it. She saw Steve turning book pages on the iPad and using the iBooks store, and said flat out, “I want one of those!” She doesn’t touch a computer. She lets “Dad” (her husband) do it, while she sits just behind him, back seat driving. They purchase books on Amazon.com together, look up insurance information together, and still insist on using an actual paper phone book to find a local barber, because they think Google Maps is some kind of ungodly magic.

She wants one.

I said to her, “You know, the Kindle DX is about the same price.”

She replied, “But this one does so much more.”

How many people just like her are in the US? How many on the planet? We, the computer literate, are not the majority, or else people would never need to call the Geek Squad.

I am the minority, and I was wrong. The iPad is not a lackluster device – it’s just not my device. If Steve just said so in the first place, If we could have looked at if from that perspective, while he was sitting there in his chair surfing the internet, then we could have seen it.

Looking from that perspective, suddenly it is spectacular. People who have yet to join the computer masses will be just as amazed as I was when he introduced the iPhone. What is no longer a leap for me will be an amazing leap for others.