Precisely. The article has a strange inability to look forward in time.
I also wouldn't trust these journalists and their crack team of wild guessers to know for sure that space isn't a premium even in the iPad itself. You can't judge a book by its cover, and you can't judge the internals of a piece of modern portable electronics by squinting at the outer case. The engineers have to pack a lot of stuff into these devices, in a specific configuration, as well as leaving room for the next generation of stuff. (Does anybody doubt that the iPad will someday grow a camera? That it might someday need a CDMA multiplexer?) And the size of the SIM may well have ramifications: It affects the size of the access panel that leads to the SIM, for example. It also has to be placed in a spot on the motherboard that makes it easy to omit, since not all iPads will have a SIM, and such space may be at more of a premium than we think...
Does anybody doubt that the iPad will someday grow a camera?
I don't doubt that the iPad could grow a camera. But it seems to me that it's not technical limitations keeping a camera from the iPad. I wonder if it's just the awkwardness of holding an iPad in the way necessary to take photos that led Steve Job to scrap the idea. He'd rather leave a feature off entirely than have it be implemented in an inelegant way.
I also wouldn't trust these journalists and their crack team of wild guessers to know for sure that space isn't a premium even in the iPad itself. You can't judge a book by its cover, and you can't judge the internals of a piece of modern portable electronics by squinting at the outer case. The engineers have to pack a lot of stuff into these devices, in a specific configuration, as well as leaving room for the next generation of stuff. (Does anybody doubt that the iPad will someday grow a camera? That it might someday need a CDMA multiplexer?) And the size of the SIM may well have ramifications: It affects the size of the access panel that leads to the SIM, for example. It also has to be placed in a spot on the motherboard that makes it easy to omit, since not all iPads will have a SIM, and such space may be at more of a premium than we think...