The reaction to Steve Jobs’ iPad announcement in the social circles I run in was an overwhelming “Meh.”  Even I found the burgeoning fanboy credit that Apple had earned with the iPhone quickly burning away as I wondered what the hell they thought they were doing rolling out this product that’s really nothing more than an oversized iPod Touch or iPhone as though it was the second coming of the FSM himself.

But the more that I thought about it, the more I realized that the months of leaking information to a starving media and the flashy unveiling yesterday are exactly why the iPad is probably going to succeed despite the fact that it brings absolutely nothing new to the mobile computing market.

Try to think of the last time that Apple marketed something that was a truly original idea.  The Mac?  The GUI operating system that was such a revolutionary idea had already been around on Xerox systems.  The iPod came packaged with a unique paid content delivery system, but mp3 players had already been around for some time.  The iPhone is a nifty gadget, but I remember drooling over Smartphones running Windows Mobile and PalmOS back in the mid-90s.

About the only original idea to come out of Apple in the last thirty years I can think of off the top of my head is the Newton, and that didn’t work out so well.

No, the iPad doesn’t do anything that you can’t already find out there somewhere.  Tablet PCs have been around for a few years now.  Ebooks and ereaders have been around for about as long as tablet PCs and PDAs.  And the iPhone already mostly does everything that Jobs advertised yesterday in a smaller package that’s a hell of a lot easier to carry around with you than a tablet despite the iPad’s relatively small size.

But Apple is likely still going to succeed, make a ton of money off of the iPad, and maybe even give the burgeoning ebook market the jumpstart that it’s needed to finally take a legitimate share of the publishing market.

Why?  Because Apple is repackaging all of these devices that we already own into a single, sleek, sexy package and banking on their reputation for innovation.  And the fanboys and fangirls are already salivating and clamoring to be the first to own the tablet that Jobs built despite the fact that most of them already own an iPhone or an iPod Touch.  I even felt a twinge of longing as I watched videos of the iPad being demonstrated even though the rational part of my brain knew that there was absolutely no need for me to drop $500 on what amounted to a bigger version of my beloved iPhone.

And I say more power to Apple.  They might not be the technological innovators that they often claim to be, but they certainly are excellent marketing innovators.  I didn’t particularly need a paid music downloading service before iTunes came along, but now I love being able to support my favorite artists and can’t imagine going without my favorite podcasts.  I imagine that they’ll bring a similar seachange to the ebook business with their unique marketing slant on that market.

Years from now the Apple devoted will likely look back on yesterday and call it the day that Apple changed the publishing and mobile computing industries forever with one well-timed press conference.  The fact that the industries were already in flux and that Apple just happened to arrive with a sleek product at the opportune moment will be forgotten.  But does it really matter who causes an industry paradigm shift as long as it happens?

I don’t really think so.  But I do think that Apple is about to make a boatload of money.