I'm actually surprised people have such good memories of these horrible things. Perhaps I missed something. If the iPad grew out of Netbooks then it's like it junked its own DNA and stole some good stuff from somewhere else.
I mean they really weren't that bad back in the day, though I would say they're probably the antithesis of something like an iPad.
I had a Lenovo S10 netbook (Atom N270, WinXP, 1G RAM, 160G HDD) that I used from high school to the first years of college and it was actually great for everything I needed it to do -- writing code and reading documentation -- and never broke a sweat. I did Perl, Java (Swing & Android dev), JavaScript, PHP, C++, and Flash/ActionScript development and dual booted Linux (Fedora).
The thing I really appreciated was that even though it was really cheap -- cheap enough that as a high school student I had my own laptop instead of having to share the family computer -- it did everything any other bigger laptop could do. I had both WiFi and Bluetooth (which could not be taken for granted back in the day), an SD card reader, mic and headphone jacks, and even a PCMCIA slot!
Sure, netbooks were not _better_ at anything compared to a laptop, but they also largely didn't have any hard limitations. It allowed anyone to just dive deep in and tinker and customize. On the contrary, an iPad (especially those first & second generation ones) was no more than an appliance like a toaster or fridge. It had a fixed set of things it could do, and anything outside of it was impossible.
Heck, if I was to only have _one_ computing device today and had to choose between current model iPad and a nearly two decade old netbook, I'd take the netbook any day. An iPad is doomed to forever be a secondary device, but a netbook, should you be so willing, can be your primary computer.
