Jim Dandy: No no, its not all hype. All Apple products i have used have been excellent in their area. I'm sure iPad will be an very good product. And Steve is the god of marketing. Surely it will be appealing to some people, even outside of Steve-cult.
But it is not really going to compete with laptops, thus it will not "push them off the cliff". It does not have enough features to do that. Who is really going to need a thingy that will have less features than a decent laptop and it'll be much harder to bring along with you than a mobile phone?