Is Multitasking or Lack Thereof a Deal Breaker?

"Apple's new iPad is being criticized for lacking the capacity to run multiple third party applications at once, but the company has a variety of options to pursue in addressing the issue."

Lot of complaining without much to base it on. We still don't know what the OS is going to look like on the final product, and as the article says when comparing the iPad to the iPhone , "The iPhone OS is constantly running system processes that listen to the mobile network for incoming calls and texts, it runs an iPod process for playing back music all the time, it watches for background notifications being sent to idle apps, and there's a variety of other things always going on. This is the definition of multitasking."

For what I plan on using this for (book reader mainly and surfing the web), I don't see that expanded multitasking beyond what is already on the iPhone will be a deal breaker for me. What are your thoughts?