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Credit Suisse analyst Bill Shope, who met with Apple (News - Alert) executives, says the company's open to cutting the price on the iPad if demand's below Cupertino's expectations.

Industry observer Seth Weintraub reports Shope saying “While it remains to be seen how much traction the iPad gets initially, management noted that it will remain nimble,' in other words, 'pricing could change if the company is not attracting as many customers as anticipated.”

Before the great unveiling, rumors had the iPad selling for anywhere up to $1,000. The $499 price tag (News - Alert) was a pleasant surprise, until people realized that was only for the 16GBs of storage space and Wi-Fi connectivity only version: ' Models with 3G connectivity and expanded hard drive capacity, however, cost upwards of $700, making the iPad a lot harder of a sell for many consumers,' industry observer Scott Lowe reported.

There's precedent for dropping prices to move product out the door: Those who stood in line for the first iPhone (News - Alert) paid $599, those of us who could endure uncool techie lagdom and the wannabe dork at the office pulling out his iPhone every three minutes to ostensibly 'check for messages' for a few months picked one up for $399.

Naturally the early adopters were furious, as if market realities had to conform to their wishes and as if that extra $200 wasn't the fee bleeding-edge adopters pay to be first, so Apple had to placate them with $200 store credit. They'd be perfectly within their rights to drop iPad prices that much if they felt like it was best for business, but given the screeching and squawking they endured with the iPhone they probably won't.

What's keeping us from buying an iPad, frankly, is the fact that it doesn't replace anything in our briefcase. Apple wants everybody to have to throw an iPhone, MacBook and iPad in, not wishing to cannibalize their current product line.

Blog commenter melancon notes that the problem may not be that the iPad's overpriced, but that it's underfeatured for the price, along the lines of that old 'I'm not overweight, I'm undertall' joke: 'It isn't the price but the lack of all the hardware that makes the IPad suck. Would it really be that hard to add a front facing camera? What about one USB port or even something as basic as multi-tasking. Seriously it seems Apple is missing the REASON why people are saying it's overpriced.'