I can't help feeling that this falls into the problem where netbooks are often viewed as "crap for games" because they can't run the latest AAA games, whilst a similarly sized tablet is viewed as amazing, because it can run 10 year old games...

The keyword here is GPU, and architecture. I don't know the state of current netbook, but sadly, those days, netbook is seen what office worker carry when they doesn't want to break their back, specially just to do the usual office work (word, excel, etc). I don't remember any advertising point that talk about GPU and all.

Ipad, on the other hand, is "consume" device, and this, include multimedia and games. So it is tailored that way. The GPU on the new ipad is so powerful that it was 6 times (can't remember exact fact) than asus transformer or something - although the new ipad loses on the CPU side. Just to show the stress Apple put on graphic processing.

Sadly, when I browse Autodesk designer on itunes, it seems (from the top of my memory) it can only hold 6 layer. That is sad. I guess netbook has it uses and ipad 3 has it uses, and designed around that.

Not knocking your demo mate, but since when has anyone cared about the number of polygons
thats so last century (or whenever the geforce1 256 came out)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_256
hey it did come out last century, god Im getting on years

I think it would be useful if you could repeat the test with shaded polygons with common used shaders, from more simpler ones to more complex ones.

Just like the iPhone 4(S), pushing polys themselves won't be much of a problem. The trouble is that the device is going to be so badly limited by pixel rate that you'll want to drag as much vertex pipeline as possible on to the CPU instead.

On the Ogre forum someone reports the iPad3 is substantially slower than iPad2 for rendering at the device's native resolution, but substantially faster rendering at the iPad2's resolution of 1024x768... which would fit in nicely with claims the iPad3 has twice the GPU power while having to push 4X as many pixels.

I would also be curious about this.