Today, John Gruber linked to an article at PCMag by Eric Grevstad, and quoted this bit:

That’s because, for all the talk about whether the iPad 3 will have a quad-core processor or a retina display or a VW Beetle bud vase, we already know one thing about it: It won’t be a laptop. And we know, if we’re honest, that the iPad is no substitute for a laptop. Never will be. Isn’t supposed to be.

Gruber’s comment was this:

That the iPad is not a substitute for a laptop for everyone does not mean it is not a substitute for anyone. That’s the key to the iPad’s success. Many people don’t need a laptop for their away-from-the-desk computing needs.

Which is a good start, but doesn’t go far enough. Apple’s goal is pretty clearly to replace your laptop in as many use cases as possible. Hell, Tim Cook even said as much just recently at a Goldman Sachs conference:

We started using it at Apple well before it was launched. We had our shades pulled so no one could see us, but it quickly became that 80-90% of my consumption and work was done on the iPad. From the first day it shipped, we thought that the tablet market would become larger than the PC market and it was just a matter of the time it took for that to occur.

Anyone calling bullshit on this whole post-PC thing already sounds fairly out of touch, and Grevstad doesn’t help his case when he goes on to say he wants a VGA port on his next laptop). But it’s early yet. Keep watching; this line of thinking is going to seem even more backward in the near future.