People were speculating for weeks about the name of the device, but today, everything’s official. The iPad will (hopefully) be shipping in a Wi-Fi-only model in 60 days, and a 3G-enabled device (using AT&T’s service, sorry) will be available in 90 days. There are three tiers of each, based on storage space, and the starting price for a 16GB Wi-Fi-only unit? $499. Amazing. This thing will be really fun to game on, and I’m not even thinking about the rest. We liveblogged the presentation, but if you don’t want to sift through all of that, we’ll recap what we know about the device.

Right now, we know that it’s a 9.7-inch giant iPhone. Well, minus the phone part. No camera, no multitasking, no Flash. At least two of those things can be fixed with software updates, but the things that can’t change with firmware revisions might be dealbreakers for some people.

It’s half an inch thin, roughly the same as the iPhone. It runs a slightly different build of the iPhone OS, but uses the same apps. They can be blown up to fill the entire screen, and some developers may even make new versions of their apps.

It has access to the iTunes Store, the App Store, and a new Store, the iBook Store. It features exactly what it sounds like it should. The iPad supports ePUB files, making it a lot more open. I’d assume you add those to iTunes and it sticks them on your virtual bookshelf. Same cable as the iPod and iPhone, same sort of dock will be available, and then…well, then there’s the keyboard dock. Not only will you be able to type on the screen, but you can attach a keyboard to this particular iProduct. Maybe this will make the MacBook Air obsolete. Who knows.

What we do know, though is that gaming on this thing will be incredible. Same accelerometer as the iPhone/iPod Touch, with a compass. That will make for some fairly interactive games and fun augmented reality abilities. But the biggest game-changer is the chip inside. Based on what EA showed with Need for Speed Shift, the CPU is pretty good. My phone probably would’ve chopped that to bits. The more space you have, the better you can do.

The real fun comes when indie designers get their hands on this. Can’t wait to see what they come up with (even if I can’t play it immediately).

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