Can an iPad work to replace a computer in terms of photo management? Our Mac is broken and we are contemplating not replacing it. One need we can't see a solution is replacing an iPhoto library with many 10 G of photos. Obviously we'd need to go for the 64 GB iPad if we wanted lots of pictures.

Most of our pictures are in the 5 megapixel range (JPG between 2 and 4.5 MB each) and we expect to have between 5 and 10 thousand pictures to start.

Can I just move an entire iPhoto library to an iPad? I'm looking for experience people have had managing a non-trivial amount of photos entirely from iOS. Obviously, we may need to still get a compute, but I wondered how "PC free" we might be able to be at this point in iOS and with apps that are available in late 2012.
There are numerous hard drives that will work with the iPad. Some wireless, others via USB (with the camera connection kit). The lightening port is a whole other thing if you end up with the 4th gen iPad, though there might be a workaround.

Here's a 1TB wired solution from HyperDrive

Here's a 500gb wireless solution from Seagate