I actually find Swype on my android phone to be easier for text input than the iPad. My wife also puts down the iPad and grabs her iPhone when it's time to reply to emails. She doesn't like full ten finger typing on it and she can't thumb type on it like on her phone.
For me, the iPad 2's Smart Cover's ability to prop it up makes all the difference. I end up using it for lots more "laptop replacement" tasks because it's so much easier to type on with the Cover folded back.
My wife has an iPad 1 with a similar case (Incase or Belkin, can't remember which), but she still doesn't like typing on it. My theory is that it's partly ergonomic, but partly a matter of expectations. A phone is a completely different form factor, so you don't expect an experience that has any sort of fidelity to using a physical keyboard (also the keys are closer together). On an iPad-sized virtual keyboard, you hit a sort of uncanny valley, wherein it feels like a bad version of what you're used to, instead of a totally different thing. But that's pure conjecture.
The input thing is why I'm bearish on tablets in general. I like not just having a physical keyboard because it's faster and feels better, but I also like that there's a portion of my hardware that's dedicated to input. On an abstract level I feel like it is a more egalitarian paradigm, to put my ideas on the same starting level as everyone else's. It's like having upstream and downstream parity. Maybe that's silly, but it's how I feel.
