There are some practical uses for tablets in general. We have a couple at work. I'm in the electric motor industry and sometimes when there are tens of thousands of dollars involved, we find it easy to take photos of the motors in the workshop on the tab and email them with attached documents then and there to the mines/quarries/manufacturers. Also handy on site to. As for iPads specifically, I'm not sold since i can do the same junk from my iPhone. The Android and Win OS tabs seem to be a lot more friendly when connecting to our Win OS computers and laptops too.
It will be interesting to see what Apple do next. They have good competition now and their niche is gone, but they've always managed some sort of innovation in recent times.