John Gruber of Daring Fireball was at the iPad 2 event on March 2. First, the guy eats, breathes, and sleeps Apple. His analysis of all things Apple is as close as most people will get to being inside Steve Jobs' head. And once again John completely understands where Apple has positioned themself:

Jobs seemed particularly ebullient throughout, but never more so than when discussing the iPad’s competition. There’s a palpable sense among everyone from Apple I spoke to yesterday that this is the biggest and most important thing in the history of the industry. The this isn’t just the iPad. It’s the whole iOS ecosystem — iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, the App Store, the 200 million iTunes Store account holders, the Apple retail store empire where customers get to touch these things that must be touched to be understood. But the iPad best exemplifies the advantages Apple draws from these things.

Last year, Apple’s take on the iPad seemed to be that they believed they had something good. This year, they seem to know they have something enormous. Presumably, there’s an A5-based dual core iPhone 5 coming in June and a corresponding new iPod Touch and who knows what else coming in September, but Apple is already, a mere two months into it, calling 2011 “The Year of the iPad 2”. Apple sells every new product hard, but they’re not prone to that sort of hyperbole.

In his conclusion, Jobs said, “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology is not enough.” That’s what separates Apple from everyone else, and the iPad epitomizes it. It’s better designed, has more developer support, and it’s cheaper. There are aspects of this that Apple’s competitors seemingly can’t copy — lower prices from economies of scale, amazing battery life, UI responsiveness, build quality.

Go read the whole thing.