Interesting. I didn't even question this part :). 80% of people here make money off of software. If I was being funded by an iPad app it definitely would be that important.
I can't believe people are responding negatively to your comment.
Of course you can do development in the simulator or on an older model for a couple of weeks. Developing on the old model is probably a must-do for at least another year or two.
Furthermore, while you do need to test on a device later in the dev cycle, I (and most other devs I know) actually don't deploy to hardware for days at a time early in the cycle.
Early in the iphone dev cycle there were enormous disparities between bugs on hardware and the simulator. Some symbols didn't even link consistently between the two and re targeting would cause compilation errors. This is no longer the case and the two targets are very, very close.
In fact, if someone told me they wanted to get into ipad development, I would tell them to write their app first, and then buy an iPad to test it on.
Emulators aren't 100%, I had a problem with an app that worked perfectly on the simulator, and crashed on the device. Also, if you are doing something with the new features, like the cameras, you will need a new device.
Also of note: there is no iPhone/iPad emulator, only a simulator. There's huge differences in performance, in addition to some rare bugs that only manifest themselves on either the simulator or the device.