Widescreen... The iPad plays widescreen movies fine...Except for FLASH, the iPad has capability for all these things and the watermelon/rock has none of them.Multitasking... The iPad, like the iPhone, multitasks native Apps fine, currently multitask some third party apps such as Yahoo Messenger's notification and MDN notification just fine, and with the release of iPhone OS4 this fall, will multitask many other third party apps just fine.
Flash Support... It will not support Flash, and probably never will, because Flash is a 32 bit application and iPad and iPhone are 64 bit Operating Systems... and Flash is a resource hog that eats CPU cycles.
Camera/Webcam... With a 99¢ app, available now, the iPad will allow an iPhone 3Gs camera to be controlled and shoot pictures for the iPad and display them on the iPad... in real time. Other apps are on the way that will do the same thing with ANY bluetooth capable camera.
phone/video call... The WIFI capable iPads work just fine with the iPhone version of SKYPE... and will make phone calls to any phone in the world using the built in microphone and speakers.... or to a Bluetooth headset.
Removable battery... First of all, the battery in the iPad is dangerous to handle, secondly, the addition of a battery access port would add weight and complexity and cost to the iPad, and thirdly who needs a replacement battery when the iPad has a measured 11.8 hour life between charges, and a 30 day standby time?
Memory Card Slot... The iPad was designed to be a Cloud based computing device with storage on the cloud. Which memory card of the 14 current standards would Apple have decided to include? Someone would have been excluded no matter which Apple chose. Most people have no need for one, why make them pay the cost for something they will have no need for?
USB Port... The iPad has a USB port as part of the charging access port on the unit... and a accessory USB port is available for purchase for those who feel compelled to have one. However, the purpose of a USB card is rapidly being replaced by Bluetooth enabled devices. For example, Bluetooth printers are becoming standard.
HDMI or VGA... Again, for the vast majority of iPad users, this is totally unnecessary, so why force users to pay for something they would never use. An accessory port with a video out port is available for those small percentage of users who feel the need for a small price.
TV or FM Receiver... Apps are available for both of these to receive streaming music and TV feeds over the internet. Why have heavy hardware add ons to do something that can be done in software?
CD/DVD or Bluray... These are now antique standards... If you want a movie ... download it from the cloud or from your computer. If you have it already on a DVD, use one of the available utilities to rip it to a file and import it to your iPad.
OS X... iPhoneOS is a subset of OSX. However, apps are available that allow an iPad user to access both an OS X Mac or a Windows computer over the internet and fully use either of those computers.
Text Editor... Pages is a full fledged word processor app, with the full ability to create content in either Rich Text Format, text ASCII, or in Microsoft Word format.
So, so much for the smarmy iPad to Watermelon/rock comparisons... they are so much ignorance about the actual capabilities of the iPad... written by people who have not bothered to do even a smidgen of research.