Blackberries were almost ubiquitous among those with government provided at the US federal agency I work for. I bought a first generation iPhone on launch day and immediately started using it at work, initially connecting to email at work over the web when connected to the office wifi. A few others followed soon after. When iOS 2.0 came out, we quickly figured out we could connect directly to the office email server due to an Exchange setting that was set for Windows Mobile users. Personal iPhones appearing at work ballooned after that point. Eventually the IT folks got the message and officially offered iPhones as a government provided option, which are now as common as Blackberries. Maybe more so.
As a smart phone, iOS is fantastic. They've recently tried to start bringing in iPads as tablets and even low end net book replacements. It isn't working and they seem to be retreating a bit already. I haven't tried one at work yet, but from talking to those who have, I think there are essentially two reasons for the failure of iPads as an office tool - both of which would be trivial for Apple to fix.
The biggest problem is the lack of a user accessible file system that can be shared by other apps. It's a tolerable and not terribly critical limitation on a smart phone. But for a device essentially trying to act as a laptop, it's a serious limitation. Quite often situations come up with needed to access files on office filer servers, sharing files between apps, storing attachments from emails or attaching files to emails, or sharing files with jump drives. Not having a user accessible file system makes such normally trivial tasks impossible or sufficiently convoluted as to make the iPad impractical as a laptop replacement. Obviously iOS has the capability to manage files, surely it would be trivial for Apple to write an iOS app version of the Finder that could provide minimal functionality.
The smaller problem is the lack of a mouse. Touch is great on a smart phone, but on a full screen device, sometimes an external pointing device really is better. The bluetooth attached keyboard seems to solve half of the problem of using iOS as a laptop replacement, but without a capability for having a mouse (or trackpad) as at least an auxiliary external pointing device, the iPad again false short even though the iPhone is perfectly adequate as a smart phone. Here too, given that the simulator in the iOS SDK functions just fine with a mouse and given that iOS devices can already accept bluetooth connected keyboards to augment the on screen keyboard, it seems like this would be a trivial improvement for Apple to make.
The added benefit of both of these changes is that when iOS 5 comes out, if the bluetooth radio in AppleTV is activated and the app store opened up to AppleTV, it would essentially become a full fledged computer for $100 plus a TV, keyboard, & mouse. Give it Thunderbolt connector to allow room for I/O growth & flexibility and iOS could easily do to the low end desktop market what it has done to the smartphone and netbook markets.
Apple has brought new products to market, ipod, iphone and now ipad ... and their record is awesome. Apple spends more in R&D that many other companies spend in advertising.
