Right down the street from the corner of Haight and Ashbury. The iPad is not a computer, and competitors who approach it like the PC market will fail, says Apple's Steve Jobs.

Like he did at last year's iPad introduction, Jobs closed today's iPad 2 event by talking about Apple's philosophy of marrying technology with liberal arts (always a nice moment for all the former English lit and philosophy majors following along at home).

Then he explained why he thinks Apple will continue to stay ahead in the tablet market:

Our competitors are looking at this like it's the next PC market. That is not the right approach to this. These are post-PC devices that need to be easier to use than a PC, more intuitive. The hardware and software need to intertwine more than they do on a PC. We think we're on the right path with this.

Contrast this everybody else's playbook, which comes straight out of the traditional computing industry:

Google is building software and specifying reference designs, but is leaving the actual hardware up to partners like Motorola, just like Microsoft did with Windows in the PC world. -The results so far aren't very good.

HP is promoting traditional PC business functions like printing for the TouchPad, and it's also putting WebOS onto full-fledged PCs.

Research in Motion is planning to sell the PlayBook mainly to corporate IT departments by pushing features like security and manageability.

Microsoft is so addicted to its Windows margins, that instead of using the perfectly adequate Windows CE to get a tablet competitor out now, it's going to spend the next few years revamping the full version of Windows so it can work on tablets, while still serving regular old notebooks, desktops, and corporate needs.

Is Jobs right or wrong? Is the iPad a sub-par PC or a completely new category of device? The next couple of years will tell.