<i>In a very real way, it did. Fifty or sixty years ago, people prepared food largely from scratch. Now, a large proportion of the population of Western nations prepares food by poking a hole in the plastic cover, closing the door, and hitting "Express".</i><p>The microwave let people who didn't want to spend their time cooking do more interesting things.  Is their life worse for the wear?  Only because food prepared as a frozen dinner is inferior to food prepared by hand.  The same is <i>exactly the opposite</i> of software.  Software prepared by a professional is almost always of superior quality to a script that Bob wrote in his spare time.  Maybe not if Bob is actually very good a programming, which leads into...<p><i>Al3x is asserting that this is bad because there's not really much of a path from 'here' to 'there'. You can't get started by running scripts in a shell, or writing AppleScript, or whatever — you get apps from the App Store and that's it.</i><p>This is patently false.  The iPad is not a primary computing device, and will not replace a laptop or desktop, which by (current) definition is open to these things.  Apple is not holding back the iPad-hosted compiler and shell.  There <i>is no</i> iPad-hosted compiler or shell.  Additionally, the development environment which does get you from 'here' to 'there' <i>is</i> openly (but not freely) available.  You can write and run any application you choose, the same way that Apple does, via the Developer Program.