I have both of those devices on my desk. The originals of both. The similarities of both: rectangular, displays, batteries (dead), audio jack, charging ports and could play music.
Aside from the large list of physical differences (like, one has cameras while one has a big flat physical turntable as its input device), the biggest category of differences is as large as the number of unique apps there are in the app store. Because the biggest difference is: one does anything, the other does one thing.
Still, you're right. One doesn't leap over oceans of differences. There were many products and ideas between the original iPod and the iPad, each one potentially sharing with or influencing the other.
Pretty sure they meant a big iPod touch, which was basically an iPhone without the phone part, not a gen 1 iPod.
The 2nd gen iPad was the real magic, and made me start paying more attention to Apple. There were rumours of a "Retina display", higher res than an HDTV in a tablet size. I was doubtful. I figured if display manufacturers could do that, we wouldn't be stuck with all these 1080p monitors and 768p laptops... Well, it turns out I was wrong. Display manufacturers just can't be bothered to make compelling displays on their own for some reason.
That crisp display, with enough horsepower to run things smoothly, there was nothing else comparable at the time.
> What specifically do you think the iPad inherited from the Newton, that didn't come to it through the iPhone/iPod Touch lineage
iPhone / iPod Touch / iPad all come from the Newton lineage.
But the person I responded to said “iPod”. The iPod is far removed from iPhone / iPhone Touch / and iPad in terms of interaction modality, operating system, application platform, etc.
The iPod doesn’t run iOS, is a media player not general purpose computing device, like the others and their ancestor, the Newton.
The person you responded to did say "iPod" but they surely meant iPod Touch. It's an easy mistake to make, you even made a similar mistake above writing "iPhone" when you meant "iPod" so very easy to do:
