It's sort of weird to separate them out. Laptops were for the early adopters. They make up the first 10% of the area under the curve from zero to the adoption plateau of general purpose computing devices.

pads will constitute the renaining 90%. They are bringing a useful machine to the $500, $400... even $100 market. They, like cell phones did for cameras, are what will make the technology ubiquitous.

So, it's hard to say what is "more revolutionary". If you are more concerned with the invention of the basic concepts, the PC is. If you are more concerned with what were the last big changes required to unleash the technology in a ubiquitous way, pads are.

Unconvinced.

It might seem like laptops are revolutionary, or were, but useful ones have been around for 20 years, and to what end? They've become progressively more useful in terms of screen quality and battery life, but they have consistently failed to produce any kind of revolution. And why should they? They're just a more expensive version of your desktop computer, that's small enough to carry around.

I'm happy to class this as useful, but the laptop's persistent insistence on being merely a small version of the desktop falls somewhat short of "revolutionary".

Laptops made new types of work and socializing possible. Affordable laptops enabled people to cowork, work nomadically, come together for "data potlucks", etc. Laptops largely replaced turntables and hardware instruments. *pads merely iterates on this initial revolution, making it more convenient and providing training wheels for those not born into technology-influenced culture.

Disagree. Laptops were revolutionary for power users; post PC is revolutionary for the everyfolk.

Post PC means Jill Sixpack always has a net-connected device within arms reach. This is a big step closer to constant personal net connectivity.

Smartphones and 3G did this before *Pads.

The term post-PC includes both smartphones and tablets. These devices have a distinct use case to laptops.

Sure, but "post" implies replacement, implying that PCs are somehow obsolete. It would be akin to heralding the introduction of compact cars to being the "post-sedan" era. "Mobile computing" is a more accurate and less marketing-driven way to say "post-PC". Mobile computing hardware, like the Palm Treo, has been around for awhile... 3G is the technology that has really helped it come of age.