[jcl]

I have to wonder if it is perhaps due to the resolution of the iPhone. As I understand it, most iPhone apps are hardcoded to the iPhone screen size, so if Apple wanted to reuse iPhone apps on the iPad, it would either need to use an itty-bitty screen or resize the display.

1024x768 is the smallest standard 4:3 resolution to fit a doubled iPhone screen, which is 320x480, doubled to 640x960. Hardware support for pixel doubling could be faster and use less power than scaling a textured 3D quad. But regardless of how the scaling is performed, an integer multiple will probably look better than scaling to an arbitrary size.

One undesirable artifact of doubling the iPhone screen on a 1024x768 screen is that it would have borders all around the edges. And this is precisely what we see on their demo page. http://www.apple.com/ipad/app-store/

[frankus]

The border does leave space for "out-of-band" touch areas, like the one to toggle scaling.