I’ve always found the “easy enough for mom” trope a bit hollow, probably because my parents are really quite savvy. Dad is an engineer by schooling, programmed with punchcards, remembers when nerds measured their sliderules in feet and probably paid more for his first HP calculator than he did his first car. Mom networked the family computers before such a thing was as easy as a linksys router and has been using Firefox, without my prodding, since it was a 1.something. The run their own business that, among many other things, retrofits home automation technology to assist the elderly and people with special needs.

Yesterday, Dad bought an iPad. They were in town for a visit and, of course, got to play with mine for a while. Dad started with the telltale questions that he’s been mulling this over for a while and is really just looking for a justification for his inner geek now. Actually getting to handle one was the final push he needed. Ostensibly, he’ll use it for corporate presentations and as a way to differentiate his company from competitors but I think he also wanted a little of that future shine.

Having helped get the folks setup, I’ve got some thoughts.

First, Apple has really nailed the demo to sale experience. Our Apple store in Seattle is average size and was packed late on a Sunday but there were plenty of demo units to try out. We walked in looking for a new case for dad’s iPhone, walked out $900 later with a 64GB iPad and a bag full of accessories. I lined up on day one for my iPad and was cheered by hordes of blueshirted geniuses, it doesn’t take much to wow me. Dad is a more typical customer but was impressed the whole way, from the service to complete lack of lines at checkout time. Serving the needs of both nerds and normals is no mean feat.

Initial setup was another matter, though, and I’m surprised how cumbersome this part feels. First, before you can even make your first swipe, you have to authenticate with iTunes – why? This automatically makes it feel less like a magical device and more like another appendage, like it really is just a big iPod Touch. Maybe no big deal for you with your quad core iMac but it’s lame to plug in a shiny new iPad to your dad’s Dell laptop, only to have it tell you you need to download 100MB worth of iTunes updates just to get started.

Once you’re in, it’s better, of course, with all that glass and the internet you can touch. There are a few concepts that are more confusing than they need to be. Probably the most frustrating to understand or explain is how iTunes is now in three different places. If you want to buy a song or a movie, you open iTunes. If you want to play that movie, thought, you open the iPod. Ready to blow some dough on a few apps? You’ll need the app store, um, app for that. Perhaps this is how it should be, but on the computer, all of that is bundled into one megalithic place, iTunes, and the inconsistency between the two is confusing.

One of the first things my dad did was log into his company’s website to bring up their internal reporting tool. Which is, of course, heavily chart-based and built in Flash. I didn’t even begin to try to explain the politics of that one, all my dad knew is that he was getting auto-redirected to Adobe’s Flash installer in some sisyphean loop. This is certainly more of a poor implementation issue and really isn’t the fault of the iPad, unless you’re Lee Brimlow, but I found myself wishing Apple had a better story than broken blue boxes.

Then there are the iWork apps. Months ago, dad sent me a somewhat cryptic text, asking if the iPad ran Windows or Microsoft Office – nope, I replied, it runs its own OS and apps, just like your iPhone. This week, I showed him Pages and Keynote, how it was possible to run a presentation in your hand, but getting it there was another matter. I tried explaining the steps it would take to get a Powerpoint on to his iPad, the exporting and the emailing, and already anticipate some frustration. The obvious answer is a seamless cloud storage experience, which Apple has proven time and again that they simply don’t get. Google, and to some degree Microsoft, treat the cloud as first class citizens, with tablets and phones being mere physical manifestations of those ones and zeros. Apple clearly prioritizes its hardware and software but if they don’t get some religion about syncing and storage soon their magical devices are going to look like parlor tricks.

An hour later, though, the sailing was decidedly smooth, Dad had downloaded a library of free books (“I should read Huck Finn again”) for the flight home the next day, childlike wonder vibrating the room. Mom was researching dog breeds and checking the next day’s weather with the greatest of ease. Magical, I don’t quite know, but certainly a hit.