Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak may have left his work at Cupertino in the late 1980s, but he still gets as geared up as the rest of us when a product is launched by the company. But why is he buying two iPads?

Newsweek scribe Daniel Lyons -- better known for his satirical pen name “Fake Steve Jobs” -- landed a quick interview with Steve Wozniak as he was driving through a snowstorm in Green River, Wyoming en route to judge a high-school robotics competition. (True story!)

“I’m out here on the road with four cell phones and two GPS devices, trying to look at maps,” Woz exclaimed, “and I wish I had an iPad with me now.”

When asked if he thinks Apple’s latest device will be a big hit, Woz proclaims, “I think it’s going to be huge in the education market. Think about students going off to college. They want an Apple product, but their parents don’t want to spend that much. Now they have the ideal thing… the guy with the iPad will get all the attention” when compared to another student with a “whacked-out $6,000 laptop.”

Woz wasn’t quite sold on the device at first, however. “At first I thought, this is not for me,” the inventor reveals. “I have the iPhone for mobility and a computer for my computer life. With the iPhone there are certain things it just doesn’t do well, mostly in browsing. It’s horrible to navigate a map on an iPhone because of the screen size.”

But Wozniak sees the iPad as ideal for his in-laws, for example: “They’re not ready for the complicated computer world,” he confesses. “They have these old computers. But the iPad simplifies things. It’s like a restart.”

The Apple co-founder has ultimately been sold on the device, so much so that he’s buying two of them! “I’ve ordered one for a friend. Then I ordered two for myself. One with the Wi-Fi and one with the 3G. And I’ll go to the store on Friday night and wait in line, just for fun,” Woz says.

Oh, and by the way: While Wozniak also owns a Google Nexus One and a Motorola Droid, his favorite phone is still the iPhone, mostly “because of the apps.” The admired inventor has also solved the problem of the iPhone’s short battery life.

“I just have two iPhones,” Wozniak confesses. “If the battery runs down on the first one, I can use the other. And if I’m talking on one, I can use the other one to look something up. You would not believe how much use I get out of that.”

(Image courtesy of Cult of Mac)