Apple confirms date for its 'event': we know it's a tablet, but what else?

Here we go. Perhaps piqued by BBC Tech correspondent Rory Cellan Jones saying that Apple was leaving it late to issue invitations to its event on Wednesday week at the Yerba Buena Arts Center in San Francisco to launch its tablet, Apple has issued invitations to an event at Yerba Buena Arts Center in San Francisco on Wednesday week to see... "its latest creation".

Seeing the invite, the snark is already quite high (a new version of MacPaint! suggested some) but we can see certain things here.

The New York Times - which is due to introduce a paywall - is widely expected to be one of the partner organisations that will be represented on stage next week:

"sources speculate that [NYT chairman Arthur J] Sulzberger will strike a content partnership for the new device, which could dovetail with the paid strategy".

First, you can be sure that it is going to be a tablet. After all this time, it looks like Apple has finally figured out how you can do something with a tablet/slate (more the latter - as in a device without a keyboard, not even a slide-out one).

It's interesting that this is fully eight-and-some-change years after Microsoft reckoned it had cracked it: who can forget Bill Gates announcing at Comdex in November 2001 that "I'm already using a Tablet as my everyday computer. It's a PC that is virtually without limits -- and within five years I predict it will be the most popular form of PC sold in America." (Look, it's the computing equivalent of Andrew Neil in Private Eye, OK?)

But what's happened in those intervening eight years is that all sorts of new computing ideas have come along - particularly multi-touch, which you're familiar with from the iPhone. But actually Apple was trying it on a "safari pad" - a sort of web tablet - before the iPhone, according to a New York Times piece from 2007: "Mr. Jobs seized on the multitouch technology after Apple product designers proposed it as a 'safari pad,' a portable Web surfing appliance. Instead, he saw the technology as something that could be used for a similar purpose in a cellphone."

The only questions outstanding now are:
(1) how much will it cost in the UK if it's $1,000 or so in the US? Best guess: £1,000.
(2) what's it going to be called? Some of my money is on iPad - have a look at iPad.com, which changed hands in April last year but is peculiarly quiet and belongs to the mysterious "Enero 6 Corporation" (who? although as a point against iPad, it seems to be written in Microsoft's ASP scripting language), but the rest is on iSlate - given that islate.com presently shows up as being parked with Markmonitor.com, which all Apple-owned domains turn out to be once they're made live. Then again, the iBook name is available again

So: what's your prediction for how - if at all - the iSlate/iPad is going to rock the world? And what will it get right that the since-2001 tablets and slates haven't?