He likes it — especially the size:
For me, the key is the size. Again, I was skeptical at first, but for many situations, I’ve come to love the 7-inch frame. The iPad is brilliant when you’re sitting on a couch or camped out in a coffee shop. In my view, the 9.7-inch iPad is slowly but surely becoming a laptop replacement. I expect this to continue. But a 7-inch tablet is different. The iPad is clunky to read in bed, for example. The Nexus 7 is perfect for that. […]
Whereas laptop sizes vary mainly to please screen size preference, I suspect that 7-inch tablets will fit naturally into different use cases than 10-inch tablets. In other words, I believe they’ll end up being closer to two different categories rather than two variations of the same category.
So if the iPad is a valid laptop / PC replacement, would that make a 7.85-inch iPad Mini more like what people originally assumed the iPad would be? Who can say, since we’re speculating about an unannounced and as-of-yet non-existent product, but perhaps “a big iPod touch” may turn out to be a fair description of the iPad Mini after all (it was a completely incorrect description of the original iPad).