Apple’s product won’t kill Amazon’s sales of content, either: Amazon sells content to iPhone users, and Amazon’s iPhone app will run just fine on the iPad. Better, maybe, if Amazon tweaks it to make use of the improved system resources.

Apple launched the iPad so there’d be a product that did what the iMac promised to do – make it easy to get online quickly – but for people who either want to relax in a position that makes computer desks and tray-tables unworkable (or want a cheaper portable device that doesn’t suck).

The fact that Apple might sell iPad buyers content like books is sort of like the fact that iPod buyers might also buy music from Apple. Sure, it could happen – Apple will offer it to make sure users aren’t kept away due to incompatible file formats offered by a diverse array of content vendors – but the expected payoff for Apple is in the hardware.

The iPad wasn’t made to go head-to-head with the Kindle, which is optimized for one single task. It was made for people who wouldn’t buy a Kindle because they don’t want to invest in one single task, but would be interested in a versatile product that addresses a broader interest in the internet and mobile computing, and maybe offers a game-pad opportunity or traveling movie-viewer.

Apple’s list of “i” devices has grown from the original iMac. Look at the original iMac launch event, and at what Apple claimed to be doing with the iMac. Apple isn’t trying to make money selling books any more than it tried to make money selling music – it set out to sell hardware, and the other stuff is a byproduct of efforts to keep customers from being driven away by incompatible file formats.

Why worry what iPad will do to Kindle? The reason Amazon doesn’t confess its Kindle sales is that Amazon isn’t proud of them. Amazon does, however, want to sell content, and Amazon will do just fine selling content to iPad buyers, who will be much more likely to read books on the iPad than they were to read them on tiny smartphone screens, however nice their user-interface. Kindle will doubtless continue to be sold by Amazon to those who want to buy electronic books, and who won’t be able (as Jobs assumes all will be able) to plug the thing in daily for a recharge.

If the Kindle’s content pricing is better, iPad users will access it through Amazon’s Kindle-reading app, unless they are Kindle lovers and have one already.

The benefit of iPad isn’t that it is “better” than Kindle, but that users might carry an iPad to do other things and, as a byproduct, end up happening to have an eReader on them because their iPad does that, too.