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There’s a dock, of course, to let you turn the iPad into a nice picture frame or video viewer and a physical keyboard dock which charges the iPad and makes it more functional for typing. “Just keep one of these in your den, and when you have to write ‘War and Peace,’ just plug your iPad into it,” Mr. Jobs says.

The first iPads will ship in 60 days, with 3G models taking another month with prices ranging from $499 to $829.

“When we set out to develop the iPad, we not only had specific technical goals and user interface goals, but an aggressive price goal, because we want to put this in the hands of a lot of people,” Mr. Jobs says. Apple has met its cost goals: The iPad’s pricing starts at $499. (Which means, at the very least, there is little reason to buy the much more limited Amazon Kindle DX.) For $499, you get you 16 GB of storage, with WiFi built-in. For $599, you get 32 GB of storage. For $699, you get 64 GB of storage. The 3G models cost an extra $130 each. So all told, there are six models of the new iPad. The most eexpensive 64 GB model, with 3G, costs $829 plus the monthly charge.

There will be two 3G plans for iPad owners. The first one, for up to 250 MB of data a month, will cost $14.99 per month. For unlimited data, its $29.99 a month.

“We have a breakthrough deal with AT&T, who is providing the service,” Mr. Jobs says. No Verizon Wireless, it appears. He says iPad owners will also get free access to AT&T hotspots. Let’s all hope that AT&T solves its network issues before this thing hits it. No contract — you can cancel the plan anytime you want.

International wireless deals will be coming by June. All the iPad 3G models are unlocked, and use the new GSM micro-SIMs, so it will be easy to put iPads on those networks.

Mr. Jobs is talking about iWork on the iPad, and Phil Schiller, Apple’s chief marketing executive, is on stage to talk about it.

There’s a new version of Keynote, Apple’s presentation software, and Pages, its word processor, and Numbers, its spreadsheet creator, all tailored to a gesture-based input device. All of Apple’s productivity software looks workable on the iPad — I’m just not sure why people would want to do this kind of work on a keyboard-less device.

Mr. Jobs has put an Amazon.com Kindle on the stage and says Amazon has done a great job of pioneering that. “But we are going to stand on their shoulders and go a bit farther.” He’s showing a new app, called iBooks. This is significant for the publishing industry: Apple is going to try to control the e-book experience itself. A new iBooks store is integrated with the iBooks app, allowing people to discover and purchase Five of the largest publishers — Penguin, Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan and Hachette — are supporting the app. No mention of Random House, yet. But that’s probably just a matter of time.

The iBooks store looks neat — plenty of colors, vivid book covers. Mr. Jobs is showing “True Compass” by Edward Kennedy, a book that was not available in the Kindle store for weeks after its release. Changing pages, zooming to the table of contents, color, video, is very easy, Mr. Jobs says. Needless to say, Apple and Amazon are on a collision course. Media (books, music, video) constitute half of Amazon’s revenues, and it won’t go down without a fight. Apple uses the ePub format, the most popular open book format in the world. It’s unclear what digital rights management they are using and whether these books will be transferable to other devices that support ePub, like the Barnes & Noble and Sony e-readers.

You get the feeling that the iPad is creating and killing categories at the same time. It is a remarkably ambitious project in terms of all the things — photos, games, video and e-mail — that it is attempting to grab market share in. One of the weird things about the presentation is how it is really all about the software. The gadget itself is transparent, a window into software. There is really only a single mechanical button on the device, the “on” button. The rest is all fingers interacting directly with software. The scaling of the landscape has significant implications. Seems like it is living up to the hype, or at least coming close. “Isn’t this awesome?” Jobs says. It is, but everything looks good on stage. Nothing ages faster than the future when you get it in your hands.