By calling the product “magical and revolutionary”, Jobs looked to be applying the polish a little too vigorously and at risk of resembling P.T. Barnum. Certainly, according to the Telegraph, analysts CCS Insight see nothing revolutionary in it, and Gizmodo can’t see it as a must-have for millions of homes.

But I’m not so sure. I think that, even though this might not push the envelope technologically or create a totally new product category, Apple have indeed packaged up the capabilities that millions of homes want. Take my wife (go on, please! Ta da!). She would love something tactile and gorgeous from Apple, but has never been a heavy enough phone user for an iPhone. Meanwhile, the iPod Touch has seemed too small, fiddly and basically expensive for what it offers her. What she’d love is a 27” iMac flat panel, which Santa didn’t quite stretch to last year.

But hang on a minute – let’s think about her main needs and interests: email (a Gmail account), banking, search, iTunes, online shopping, a few apps (which she’s only just discovered and LOVES) and that’s about it for now. Throw in the ability to watch some films on a decent screen size, and maybe read some e-Books, and you’ve probably got everything that could be needed day-to-day. (For grown up stuff, like spreadsheets and letter writing, we’ve got a perfectly good Dell hidden away in the study upstairs, but it hardly ever gets used.)

So, why would she want to sit at a desk doing those things, which feels so ‘business’, when she could do it all in the comfort of an armchair with a cup of coffee? I think Jobs is bang on when he says the iPad will make the Internet a far more intimate experience. When you also consider how tidy an iPad will look in a family room or kitchen, as opposed to the wires, space and clutter of a Mac or PC, it looks even sexier as a proposition.

I think that’s a reasonable profile of a non-geek, average household user, precisely the sort of mainstream market that Apple has exploited so brilliantly since Jobs’ return. I haven’t even got into the other, huge markets of gamers, music fans, social media mavens and others who will apparently also be well-served by the iPad.

So, overall, I’d say Apple has done it again, even though the initial buzz might not say so. I, for one, can see little alternative to shelling out for an iPad when it comes to these shores (especially as the likely price looks pretty damn good).

In fact, what has been announced is an update to an existing programme called ‘First Click Free’, which has been around for at least a couple of years.  The change seems to be that now surfers can see up to five news items via Google before encountering the publisher’s pay wall. Originally it was just a single article, which presumably explains the relative lack of interest in this product – it can’t have laid many breadcrumbs to tempt potential subscribers to publishers’ websites.

This looks to be a simple change by Google, but one that may significantly impact the economics of online news. By tackling head-on the seemingly unstoppable force of free news Murdoch may have achieved something that all other news organisations have failed at. Was the Bing thing all a negotiating tactic? Possibly. I’d hate to play poker with the man.

As we’ve written before, the media has been having a terrible time of late, as the Internet has ravaged its content and made much of it available for free. Publishers’ profits have plunged, many jobs have been cut and boards have searched in vain for a business model that works in the Google era.

Now, Rupert Murdoch has had enough of what he sees as the theft of his content by search engines, and is pushing back in typically robust style. As predicted recently, he has moved to enforce ‘pay-walls’ around the websites of News Corp’s newspapers. This week, news broke that he’s looking at a deal that would ‘de-index’ News Corp’s websites from Google and instead award that privilege to Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine, in return for a fee.

At this stage, there’s no consensus on whether this is a good idea or if it can be made to work. Evangelists for free online news, like Jeff Jarvis, say this is yet more evidence that Murdoch totally fails to ‘get it’ when it comes to the Internet and that trying to screen his content behind pay-walls is futile and self-defeating. In the opposing corner is the FT’s John Gapper who thinks that maybe Murdoch knows something we’ve all missed and that this “could be a pivotal moment in Internet economics”. Although Murdoch’s titles will experience a steep decline in traffic as a result of this move, he may still end up financially better off, as Gapper explains.

If this plan comes to fruition (and isn’t just a bargaining ploy with Google) it could be an approach adopted by other publishers desperate to stem their financial losses. There could be a future in journalism after all.

The other point of interest is what this means for the search engine market. When Bing was launched earlier this year we weren’t optimistic that it would threaten Google’s stranglehold on search (about 60% of the US market and a whopping 80% in the UK). However, Gapper discloses that Microsoft is talking to other content publishers about deals similar to Murdoch’s, which could give Bing an increasing amount of the content that people really want. As a result, we may yet see real competition emerge in the search market, which can only be a good thing for the rest of us.

Silicon.com carries an interview with Microsoft’s online boss Qi Lu, which explains in more detail the benefits that Microsoft sees for both parties. It suggests that they’re realistic about the scale of their challenge in competing with Google.