She bought it to do UX design work with it, and started on a webcomic with it because she just liked playing with it so much. ArtRage is awesome on it.
Here's a review of a similar workflow from 2002 by the Penny Arcade guys using a Windows tablet.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/2002/11/27/
and here is their take on the desire of web artists to have a tablet from Apple right before the iPad came out.
I think the analogy is wrong. Myself, and many of the people I know were expecting a scaled down Mac experience in a tablet form factor, price and feature competitive with netbooks (<=$500).
OSX already runs well on hacked netbooks, so the hardware is more or less ready, put on a better display that works at a higher rez, make it touch sensitive, squeeze it into a tablet form factor, mix in driver software to handle the various and obvious netbook/tablet widgets like a webcam and tilt sensors, charge $499 for it and voila! Instant win.
Instead we got the equivalent of people showing up to the Chevy Volt unveiling, and seeing a Segway that had been scaled up to seat 2 at the same price as a Malibu.
The iPad cost $500-$900 and does a few things exceptionally well. (Like hook into iBooks, iTunes and Apple's App Store.)
The Modbook on the other hand, starts at ~$1700 and does all that other crap the technorati wanted the iPad to do. I think everyone just wanted Jobs to come out with a tablet computer that was cheap and badass like MacBooks are and, unsurprisingly, that didn't happen.
I mean, I'd love it if Chevy held a press conference and said they were going to sell Camaros for $10k. But it won't happen and I'm not going to get all indignant about it.
After all, Steve Jobs said himself they couldn't build a computer for $500 that wasn't, "a piece of crap." So I don't see what the big deal is about the iPad, in that sense. (I think it is a big deal in several other senses, like the piggy-backed announcement of iBooks and the A4 chip, etc...)