It's an interesting idea but I don't see how that would work. Apple is not an OEM -- you can't call them up and easily order 50,000 iPads to integrate into your own offerings. You would have no idea when a new iPad is coming out and what features it may have. The iPhone/iPad platform aren't super manageable. This is something I'm sure Apple will be working on but right now the idea of a hospital using the iPad in any large deployment would be really difficult. You can't even do something as simple as centralized LDAP authentication from an iPad. As far as I know there's no way to push applications to an iPad or remotely upgrade it's firmware or all these other small things you would have to consider. A dumber tablet makes more sense for something like home automation or control panels for other integrated systems. They might be more expensive right now but the iPad will definitely drive prices of large touchscreen tablets down. So if you were building something like a home automation system would you build an iPad app for it? Sure. Would you design your entire platform around relying on the iPad? Absolutely not.