Much criticism has been thrown Apple's way for the company's decision to equip the upcoming iPad tablet with the iPhone operating system, instead of the complete Mac OS X, but the company has various valid reasons to take the decision to align the device with the iPhone instead of the desktop Mac platform.

While Apple's iPad had widely been speculated to run on the iPhone OS well before it was officially announced, some experts are of the opinion that it would have made more sense to use the full version of the Mac OS X, in order to enable the gadget to run a wide range of existing desktop applications.

But such a move would have ended up making the iPad more like Microsoft's Tablet PC and OMPC devices, which run on the Windows XP, Vista or 7 platforms, with some extra software that can allow stylus or touch features.

The main problem, it seems, with running a desktop OS on a mobile device is that it might end up devoting a lot of the available screen space to elements designed to support a mouse-based interface.

Despite the fact that the iPad offers the same 1024x768 display resolution as the first ever iMac models, it tends to squeeze that same into a 132dpi, 9.7-inch screen rather than the 15-inch iMac display.