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Just 24 years into the era of the iPad, Steve Jobs’ newest toy has been introduced to resounding applause, been lauded for its beauty, and been called “a photojournalist’s dream machine,” but questions remain.

For the most part, these questions stem from a lack of clarity concerning the iPad’s flexibility as an operating device. There are a lot of people out there, myself included, who had hopes that the iPad would be the product to replace laptops to some degree. Obviously we forgot the fact that Steve Jobs is a master when it comes to product separation.

The iPad has just enough specs and features to make it valuable to those who need more than what an iPhone or iPod touch has to offer but lacks the necessary features to suffice in lieu of a laptop. Among those features:

• Flash capabilities
• A working camera, still frame or video
• Non-Internet phone functionality

That first one is the biggie. The iPad’s lack of flash capabilities may be the omission that singlehandedly restricts Apple’s new toy from rendering the laptop non-essential, but Jobs likes it that way. In restricting users from using such flash-powered sites as Hulu.com, Jobs is forcing the user’s hand and requiring that they buy movies and television shows from the iTunes store. Smart move on his part. This way he can price the Pad somewhere between an iPhone and a MacPro, picking up extra revenue through movie and TV show sales.

All this is to basically say that the preconceived notion (according to Apple) that flash slowed operations down too much to put on the iPod Touch and iPhone was straight fabrication.

There are, of course, other less-obvious features that Apple has left off the iPad that will further force users to iTunes. Though it’s available on iPhones, Apple is holding out on the iPad implementation of Microsoft Silverlight, which allows Netflix users to watch their instant movies on their devices. It’s not exactly a monopoly; just a really smart way of thinning your wallets.