Apple's not advertising such a capability and I rather doubt that the iPad, with the current OS anyway, has the drivers to recognize and use the MT. But we'll probably have to wait until someone gets their hands on one and tries it to know for sure.
Do you mean you want to connect the Magic Trackpad to the iPad and use the Magic Trackpad with the iPad? If yes the answer is no. The iPad does not support use of a pointing device. One reason s that there is no cursor to control (the character insertion point indicator you see when entering text is not a cursor).
I don't want it to work like a mouse - I want it to work just like the iPad itself. When I put the iPad in a stand and use a wireless keyboard, it's not really convenient to have to touch the screen to work with text in pages, for example. If the magic trackpad would link, I could have all the same multitouch gestures right at hand without having to reach to touch the iPad itself. This would also be useful for those using the iPad keyboard dock...
Even if you could connect it to an iPad, except for simpler fullscreen gestures like swipe and scroll, this would not work at all in practice. How would you align your finger on the trackpad to the correct position on the screen without some sort of pointer (which doesn't and will never exist on the iPad)?
It would be too bad if there were never cursor support for the iPad. It would be lovely to use magic trackpad with a keyboard. I find the touchscreen too awkward for serious writing/revision. Maybe the next Macbook air will be fit the niche market to which I belong.
I personally would love to see this in use with my iPad. I agree after you set the iPad in the dock it's very cumbersome to have to constantly be careful of pushing it over. Makeing the new trackpad act like the iPad itself would be awesome. Apple please add this to the iPad ios4. Thanks.
As an owner of multiple iPads I must agree. Please allow use of the Magic trackpad or other similar devices when iOS 4 hits the iPad. It would make docked usage and heavy email editing or use of any of the productivity tools even easier.
To introduce the trackpad or a mouse as a pointing device should be rather simple. Compare the Wacom Bamboo pad. It maps the screen onto the pad, so that pointing at the pad has the same effect as pointing at the screen. The same should be possible with the magic trackpad. The cursor has little to do with it, but of course there are many apps that have one (webform, pages,...). I think it is an omission that we may link a keypad to the iPad but not a pointing device. Without one the docking station is quite useless.
It's not about the cursor necessarily. It's about the gestures (for me at least).
Sure... there is no pointer on an iPad so you would find it hard to e.g. place the editing caret anywhere useful, but... it seems both natural and logical to me to give support for scrolling and left-right swiping with an external trackpad.
I see many possible uses... using VNC and iPad as a thin client the external keyboard and mouse/pad combination would be really useful for controlling your main Mac (or Mac TV for example).