One of the most requested features on the iPhone was the ability to natively share files between the iPhone and a USB or wirelessly connected PC or other device. Third party applications such as AirSharing and DropCopy have arisen to fill this void, but as useful as they are they don't offer the same flexibilty that a full OS integrated filesystem or file sharing system would provide.

Considering Apple's targeting of more complicated tasks, such as word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation development with iWork, it should comes as little surprise that Apple has decided to handle things differently with the iPad.