Hi everyone, I'm on the line of getting one for the business. It will have to have printing capabilities even though the main reason is for portability.
I have to assume that if one is still projecting this requirement onto the iPad, one has not read this thread. If one really needs to print, the iPad is not the machine for one. There are lots of cheaper devices that will print.
The iPad does not have (dumb) printer capability. Microsoft tests its operating systems with hundreds of dumb printers using the drivers supplied by the printer vendors. Most people only install two or three of these drivers. To be said to print, the iPad might have to have dozens. It simply is not going to happen on the iPad. It would border on magic. Magic is in short supply, even at Apple.
It is not that Apple does not understand that many people share the print requirement. They offer the Macbook for them. It will print at the expense of the portability, stability, and ease of use of the iPad.
To 'print' from an iPad, one will have to get a printer smart enough to interpret pdf. There are lots of these; most mid to large enterprises have them. Understand that these cost hundreds to thousands of dollars, not the low hundreds of dollars that most of us are accustomed to spending for SOHO dumb printers.
Kinko has smart printers; they will gladly accept office objects and print all one wants at arbitrary quality. For a price. They will even bind them for you.
I do not have much of a requirement for printing. When I need to print an object, for example, a receipt or a boarding pass, I will send it as an e-mail attachment to a fax service. The server will convert the object to a bit map and send it to the dumbest, but most flexible, printer of all, a fax machine. Most hotels and offices have one of these.
I understand that this hardly qualifies as "printing" and costs $0.50 per page but it works for the volume of paper documents I need to create.