The iPad. Don’t touch it, say these experts…

You’re getting an iPad? You’re going to create content for the iPad? You’re generally excited about the new shiny Apple thing?

It’s never that straightforward.

“Why I won’t buy an iPad (and think you shouldn’t, either)” – Doctorow.

“The way you improve your iPad isn’t to figure out how it works and making it better. The way you improve the iPad is to buy iApps. Buying an iPad for your kids isn’t a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is yours to take apart and reassemble; it’s a way of telling your offspring that even changing the batteries is something you have to leave to the professionals.”

Tim Bray: “The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger.”

Winer: “If we don’t have open boxes lying around we’ll wake up 20 years from now and wonder why there are no more hippie programmers, like Woz. Sheez, like Jobs was when he was a kid.”

But as Boing Boing commenter nerdler, says:

“Unfortunately, the vast majority of the phone-buying public don’t give two shits about freedom. They just know that the iPhone is way cooler than the nerdy android thing.”