In case you weren’t among the members of the fourth-estate lucky enough to get an invitation to Apple’s highly-anticipated unveiling of the iPad on Wednesday, here are some of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs’ key comments about the new device and its importance to the company:

“Apple is a mobile devices company. That’s what we do.”

“When you feel all this power, and this much fun, and the internet in your hands, you’ll never want to go back.”

“When we set out to develop the iPad, we not only had very ambitious technical goals, and user interface goals, but we had a very aggressive price goal. Because we want to put this in the hands of lots of people.”

“At $499, a lot of people can afford an iPad.”

“Another thing we’re so excited about is that because we shipped over 75 million iPhones and iPod Touches, there’s over 75 million people that already know how to use iPad. We can’t wait for them to get their hands on it.”

On creating an entirely new class of computing product:

“If there’s going to be a third category of device., it’s going to have to be better at these kinds of tasks than a laptop or a smartphone. Otherwise it has no reason for being.

“Now some people have thought that’s a netbook. The problem is netbooks aren’t better at anything. They’re slow, they have low quality displays and they run clunky old PC software.

“So they’re not better than a laptop at anything. They’re just cheaper. They’re just cheap laptops.

“We think we got the goods.”

On the iPad’s hardware:

“We have a chip called A4 which is the most advanced chip we’ve ever run that powers the iPad. It’s got processor, graphics, I/O, memory controller, everything in this one chip, and it screams.”

On getting into the e-book market:

“Now, Amazon’s done a great job of pioneering this functionality with their Kindle.

“And we’re going to stand on their shoulders and go a bit further.”

On Apple’s trio of online stores, iTunes, App store and new ibookstore:

“Between these stores, we have over 125 million accounts with credit cards all enabled for one-click shopping on all these stores.

“We are at scale and we are ready for the iPad.”

On that special Apple je-ne-sais-quoi:

“The reason Apple is able to create products like the iPad is because we always try to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts; to be able to get the best of both.

“To make extremely advanced products from the technology point of view, that also happen to be intuitive, easy to use, fun to use, so that they really fit the users. The users don’t have to come to them. They come to the user.”