“Apple fans started lining up at 5:30 Friday morning to be among the first in Canada to buy the iPad here,” Gillian Shaw reports for The Vancouver Sun. “I was among them.”

“I was there to write this story. But four hours later, I walked out the door of Apple’s downtown retail store with a brand new 3G iPad, making the lineup easily the most expensive I have ever covered,” Shaw reports. “I was okay to watch all my geek pals rush across the border to buy the first ones but the final straw came when my definitely non-geeky pal Margot announced at dinner the other night: ‘I think I need to get an iPad. I want an iPad so I can get all those apps.’”

Shaw reports, “That’s it — the apps have it… Even as I write this on a keyboard docking station I’ve hooked up to my new iPad, I keep leaving the keyboard to use the touch screen. It’s that tactile element that separates the iPad from the net book I use as my on-the-go machine. My laptop has become my desktop computer and stays home most of the time.

Read more in the full article here.