Having a Toshiba laptop, a 10 inch Ipad, and a 7 in Galaxy I can give you my opinion.
1. The laptop is great for typing, mass storage for things like pictures for books, or data.
Also you will get the full versions of software programs, not subsets like Photoshop etc.
2. Tablets are great for general surfing the web, email reading, news reading book reading. They are limited in storage capabilities such as mentioned above.
All software is subsets of computer programs.
Where they excel is in the apps that are usually written for one purpose. Such as news readers, games, weather, even GPS (but again a subset), camping programs etc. Where they really fall apart is in typing although they do have voice recognition. And also in price.
3. Ipad in general is good. Has great touch sense, the back lit is great for reading indoors, (not outdoors). The ten inch screen makes reading easy. There are close to 1 million apps which makes it difficult to find some apps unless you know the exact name otherwise depending are where it is located, it might take quite a while to find the one you want. I still haven't found exactly how Apple orders them or what it uses for a search key.
Another drawback is when you key in words like for a short email. Instead of giving you choices, it pops up a word and puts in near where the word would go in the email, than if you hit the space bar, it plugs that word in. That causes 2 problems. You have to keep looking up from the keyboard to see what word it is plugging in and when you don't do that you get some funny words. The net is full of funny emails that have been sent from an Apple product.
This brings me to what I dislike most about the Apple/Ipad. It is their 'we know best about how you should do things'. The above is one example of that. The other thing I don't like about the Ipad is in the voice recognition. It doesn't put the words on the screen until you stop speaking. this is another of those we know best from Apple.
The Galaxy is just as good as the Ipad and has a better idea of typing. It brings up similar words and you can select the one that best fits and the one you want is almost always there. These words are just above the keyboard so you don't have to look at entire screen to find it. The voice recognition puts the word right out there so that if it makes a mistake, you can correct it immediately.
The next thing, which could be important to some people like me, is how the tablet looks to the PC. The Galaxy looks like an external hard drive. That means that you can get or drop files just like a hard drive. The Ipad basically is not there at all. You need to use something like Dropbox or similar Cloud to get files back and forth. That also means that the app you are using must interface with the Cloud. I use Dropbox as that is the most common one for interface.
The Ipad will not charge when connected to the PC like just about any other device. Maybe it will to a Mac. I guess this is another Apple knows best.
By the way, I use the Ipad about 80 percent of the time I would on a computer device and my wife uses the Galaxy about the same. Emails though are typed on a computer unless it is a short one.
