Curiously, I don't find the Ipad user interface at all consistent.
Different apps (one has to buy quite a few apps to cover even basic requirements like decent email handling) work very differently, with different conventions, and different limitations.
Most things on an Ipad are severely cripples (inter app data transfer especially) but the crippling varies a lot from one app to another.
That said, an Ipad is the slickest "media player / web browser / pigeon English email writer" currently out.