Microsoft Surface exists for a hefty $10,000 … a table you can touch, gesture, place items on, and integrate several devices through it. While not practical for most, it’s actually a reasonable price for something so sophisticated.

Also, tablet PCs (in both the slate and convertible form factors) have been around for ages. Many of them require a statically charged pen, but many of them are active pressure sensative, and allow you to touch! No, not the sexy glass screen that the iPhone offers, but it’s pretty useful! I play crosswords on my tablet at home (in fact, that’s the primary purpose of it for me), and I love being able to naturally write on the crossword (and see it all on one screen at the same time). The best part is that it downloads the latest puzzles from newspapers for me. I’m saving trees I suppose.

Many people have installed the hackint0sh x86 versions of OSX onto their tablet PCs, giving them the strength of the OSX Touch features. Of course, there is always that one vendor who is making an iTablet out of iBooks and MacBooks by placing a touch membrane and modifying the case. Rumors have circulated for a long time about the MacTablet, but it’s not here yet, even if it’s coming.

Lastly, there are those UMPCs and desktop PCs that have the monitors built in with touch interfaces. They’re not expensive either!

The technology is here and available to all, it’s just not coming from a little Cupertino company called Apple.

1) It’s not compatible with the latest WordPress (a real bummer).

2) It has no rich-text editor that I’ve become very use to, and entering html tags on the iPhone keyboard is a pain in the ass (lots of shift and # clicking).

3) It puts all images attached at the end, and does not give you the ability to embed them in places you’d like to, or even optionally size them.

4) Drafts are not really drafts! They use a different draft categorization than the admin web interface does. So if you have any plugins that send email notifications to your user base (subscriptions) they are immediately notified of your draft, which of course doesn’t even exist publically yet. Also, your existing drafts (made in the admin web interface) show up as non-draft on the iPhone.

5) You can not set titles on the images you upload!

There are a lot of other little quirks, but it’s a nice first effort. Since they’ve released the source code, hopefully people will contribute nice patches and bring this sucker up to speed. I’m really happy they released this.

In the meantime, I actually find that the WordPress iPhone admin interface plugin is really robust, and is presented in an iPhone friendly way in Safari. You should check it out if you haven’t yet.