Well, I've escaped the reality distortion field of this morning's iPad 2 announcement, although the RDF did its best to chase me down Highway 101 back to the office. Yes, the new iPad is sweet. Super sweet! Let's explore why -- and examine what Steve Jobs and Co. chose not to say.

First off, the new design is gorgeous. (I know we use the word "gorgeous" a lot around here, but -- it's Apple hardware. The gorgeous is all over all of it.) It's 33 percent thinner, which is quite an accomplishment considering the last iPad is only 13.4mm thick. The new one is just 8.8mm thick, tapering down to the kind of thin, wedge-like edge you can open envelopes with. (Probably. I forgot to bring an envelope to the demo area with me…) It's even thinner than the iPhone 4, which Apple touted at its release as the world's thinnest smartphone. That's thin!

It's lighter too, only 1.3 pounds. The original iPad was 1.5 pounds, so that doesn't sound like a huge drop, but when you actually hold both you can really feel the difference. The back is the same aluminum, and the bezel around the screen comes in white or black. Yes, white! Pretty exciting considering the white iPhone 4 never did make it to stores. (And wasn't mentioned at the event, although Steve did assure everyone with a wry smile that the white iPad 2 "will be available from day 1." Yeah, it better be.)

The front-facing camera is VGA quality for stills and video, recording up to 30 seconds per frame. But the rear camera is HD, taking 720p video at 30 frames per second, but it can't do the 5-megapixel stills that the iPhone 4's camera can do, although you do get 5x digital zoom. (Digital zoom, as a reminder, is the crappy kind. Use it sparingly, if at all.) So this sounds like the same camera that's in the fourth-gen iPod touch, although we'll have to wait for the teardown to be absolutely sure.

But FaceTime works like a charm (I even took a FaceTime call from the charming Andy Ihnatko of the Chicago Sun-Times), and the built-in Photo Booth app is fun, fun, fun. It feels just as fluid and effortless as it does on the Mac, and really shows off the power of the iPad 2's A5 chip. When you launch Photo Booth, you see a grid of nine effects, but they update live -- you're looking at nine video feeds of yourself, each with those gee-whiz effects. Once you tap the effect you want to play with, you can manipulate it with your fingers, take snapshots, and even flip the camera around to the rear-facing one. Impressive -- and it's a built-in app. No charge.

I'm having trouble picturing (heh) people using the iPad as a really large, flat camera (i.e., just shooting with it, not using it for FaceTime or Photo Booth), but if you're connected to Wi-Fi it'll geotag your photos and videos, although not with true GPS.

Speaking of that A5 chip…how about that A5 chip, huh? We can recap what Steve said about it (same low power, twice as fast, up to 9x better graphics performance), and report that it did, in fact, feel snappy and speedy when we used it. But until we get out hands on this thing and do a battery of side-by-side tests, we can't get more specific than that. One interesting tidbit: When I asked an Apple rep if it had more RAM, he said, "We didn't mention that."

"Yeah," I agreed. "I noticed."

See, here's the thing with iPad specs. Apple doesn't want you to worry about it. Motorola and the other tablet manufacturers tend to tout PC-like specs, so the PC buyers of the world have something to chart and compare. But Apple referred to this iPad 2 several times as "a post-PC product." They want to you think of the device as a whole, not as a sum of components. They want to you to focus on what it can do, not what it's made of. To hear them tell it, it's made of an A5 chip, a precision aluminum body…and magic. So anyway, we don't know about the RAM yet either, but the traditional launch day teardown from those wrench wielders at iFixit.com will no doubt shed some light.

What else? Same screen, which is a "9.7-inch, LED-backlit, glossy Multi-Touch display with IPS technology." (Yes, I'm quoting from the specs page.) It did seem a little brighter, but that might have been all the coffee I drank. Its resolution is 1024x768, at 132 pixels per inch. It's got the same oleophobic coating, but it picks up fingerprints just like all the other touchscreen gizmos.

The Smart Covers are really nice, though. Really nice. The $39 polyurethane version comes in five vibrant colors that look as good in real life as they do on Apple.com. The $69 leather one, also in five colors, is made of nice leather, but the colors didn't really wow me. It's super neat how it snaps right on to the iPad with magnets, aligned perfectly every time -- I tried to get it to go on "wrong," and it simply refuses to. Plus, it lets you stand up your iPad in portrait or landscape, or in a tilted keyboard-friendly mode. The iPad 2 has magnets built into its frame, so we doubt this Smart Cover will work with the original iPad. The microfiber lining can clean your iPad's screen, but it doesn't really move around on the screen, so a cleaning cloth is still an essential accessory.

So the chip changed, the case changed, the cameras were added, the speaker got a little bigger, and mostly everything else stayed the same. Same screen. No extra ports. (Although the HDMI-out dongle is a great addition, for $39, providing 1080p output from any app, with a pass-through port for charging.) Same storage, either 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB. But the real big deal is one more thing that stayed the same -- the price.

Yes, iPad 2 costs the same as the first iPad. That's $499 for 16GB Wi-Fi, $599 for 32GB, and $699 for 64GB. Adding 3G service (AT&T or Verizon, your choice) adds another $130, so that's $629 for 16GB, $729 for 32GB, and $829 for 64GB. Steve made sure to point out that the "$799 tablet" (cough, cough, Motorola Xoom) is more expensive than 5 out of 6 of the iPad 2 SKUs. Well played.

What do you think, are you going to take the plunge? It will be in US Apple Stores and Apple.com on March 11 -- next Friday! -- with at least 26 other countries getting it two weeks later on March 25. If you were an early adopter, check out Gazelle.com for a decent price on your old one -- or just hit up eBay. I, for one, think it's a great machine. And its competitors sure have some catching up to do.

Any questions? Hit up the comments and I'll do my best to get 'em answered. And stay tuned to MacLife.com for more!

Check out our iPad 2 Mega Gallery from the Apple Event.