The Apple iPad continues its assault on the mighty PC industry and the market's voracious appetite for the product indicates that PC makers have yet to feel the full impact of this paradigm-shattering product.

In fact, the most striking revelations in Apple's stellar quarterly earnings report last week were not that its revenue rose 82% to $28.6 billion, or that its net income surged 125% to $7.3 billion"although those results are certainly striking.

No, what really stood out on the call was the realization that when it comes to the iPad and its impact on enterprise customers and on the PC industry itself, we are not really yet even at the end of the beginning"we are at most in the middle of the beginning.

(About the author: after many years as an editor and writer with InformationWeek and TechWeb, Bob Evans joined SAP in April as VP of strategic communications.)

That is, we are only just starting to be able to gauge the massive and wide-ranging impact that the iPad is having and will continue to have on enterprise computing and on the venerable PC industry itself: the best (or worst, depending on where you sit) is yet to come.

I have five specific reasons for believing that, and I'll get to those in just a moment.

For the PC industry, the iPad represents something very like the meteor that blasted into the Earth 65 million years ago and made life on the planet unsustainable for dinosaurs. While life went on in countless other variations, for dinosaurs and other animals unable to adapt to the new realities of life on a very different Earth, the clock had simply run out.

Several weeks ago, after analyzing Apple's first-quarter earnings results, I floated a somewhat similar idea on my SAP.com blog , and as a result some PC companies suggested that the clock had also run out on my ability to think.

They argued that while the new tablet format epitomized by the iPad is certainly shaking things up a bit, the mighty PC"a device that I readily admit will be remembered as one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century, if not the past two or three centuries"is more relevant than ever, and that a few permutations and adaptations will give it another 30 years of great success.

Hey, if I were in their shoes, I'd be saying the same thing. But the marketplace is telling us something quite different, and the marketplace always proves to be the best source of objective truth.

The best chance that PC makers have is to be brutally honest with themselves and admit that they need to get out of the spaces in which tablets will simply offer superior performance by virtue of their flexibility, form factor, user interface, immediacy, and growing acceptance as the preferred device through which people want to experience the world"at work, at home, at play, or on the go.

That brutal honesty must also extend to a hard-hearted analysis of which market segments, applications and functions will be dominated by tablets, and the PC companies should then plan to move their PCs out of those categories over the next 18-24 months.

At the same time, that analysis should also reveal areas where the PC's sophistication, power, application depth, proven levels of security, and universally accepted standards should allow it to outperform tablets by an overwhelming margin"and that's where the PC companies' time, money, and innovation should be applied.

So about those five factors powering and accelerating the iPad's creative destruction of the PC industry: here's the list, and then I'll offer a bit more on each.

1) Cannibalization's Diminishing Returns: while the iPad snacks on Macs, it lives on a non-stop diet of PCs

2) Pilot to Penetration: after a year of playing footsie with enterprise customers, Apple's getting serious

3) Unexpected Applications: corporate customers are deploying iPads in totally unprecedented ways

4) The Apple-Store Phenomenon: over the past five years, can any retail chain on Earth match Apple's astonishing financial success?

5) Hooking the Kids: the iPad has been a blowout success in the K-12 market.

As you consider those factors individually and collectively, please bear closely in mind one very important detail that, in the context, is absurdly easy to overlook or to forget entirely:

The iPad is only 15 months old.

So just imagine the momentum the iPad will have generated by the time it hits the ripe old age of, oh, 3 years. As you think aboutthat, bear these factors in mind:

1) Cannibalization: Apple freely admits that the iPad's chewing into sales of its own Mac PCs. But COO Tim Cook also freely admits that in spite of that dynamic, Mac sales continue to outgrow PC sales by a factor of 5X. "In terms of cannibalization, we do believe that some customers chose to purchase an iPad instead of the new Mac during the quarter, but we also believe that even more customers chose to purchase an iPad over a Windows PC," Cook said on the earnings call per the transcript from Morningstar . "As I've said before, there is a lot more of the Windows PC business to cannibalize than the Mac. Also, we believe that the Mac has many other attributes that would make it continue to do well in the market. We're very happy that we grew 14% versus the markets growth of 2.6% which is about five times as Peter said earlier."

2) Pilot to Penetration: In each of its past three earnings calls, Apple has emphasized the unexpected success the iPad's having in enterprise accounts, in spite of Apple's admitted lack of focus there. In last week's call, Cook signaled that Apple's approach toward corporate customers is starting to shift from surprised acceptance to focused strategy"or as he put it, from pilot to penetration. "We are also gaining traction in the enterprise," Cook said. "From the numbers that Peter spoke of, obviously now our attention is now turning and we're starting to get corporations to do not just tests and pilots, but even more"it's really converted to more of a penetration focus." In a related comment, Cook expanded on that theme: "I would characterize this as we're still building it out, and we do a bit better each quarter. We're very, very happy with the numbers that Peter talked about earlier about the level of interest and taking people to the pilot and initial deployment stages, and now our attention is moving to penetration within those accounts versus sort of getting on the standards lists."

3) Unexpected Applications: Because the iPad"and some other tablets"offer such profoundly different user experiences and intuitive capabilities, businesses are discovering that the iPad can be applied in a wide range of often-unexpected uses, and frequently in applications where no PC has ever gone before. CFO Peter Oppenheimer, after noting that quarterly revenue from sales of iPads and related accessories surged 179% to more than $6 billion, said that 86% of the Fortune 500 are now testing or deploying the iPad, up from 75% just three months ago. "In the 15 months since iPad was shipped, we've seen iPad used in the enterprise in ways we could have never imagined ," Oppenheimer said. "Companies like Boston Scientific, Xerox and Salesforce.com are deploying thousands of iPads in

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