Today I was looking at the iPad Keyboard Dock and I realized something. Apple has built an accessory which creates a very deliberate scenario. To use it effectively, you’re sitting at a desk, typing on a keyboard with an LED-backlit screen almost directly in front of your face.

Sound familiar? It should, because that’s more or less the current setup for the iMac. The only difference in this equation is the multitouch offered by the iPad and the use of the App Store. But my thinking is that the equation will be brought into balance sometime in the future.

It’s certainly not a stretch of the imagination to assume that the multitouch technology delivered to the iPhone and the iPad will eventually find its way to the desktop range. We saw the beginnings of this in the trackpad of the Macbook Pro and now the Magic Mouse, but Apple has never been a company to play things easy. They’re going to be looking to strike forward with this in a big way with a move that’ll make the HP Touchsmart look like a defective knockoff.

However, there are two things standing in the way of this. The necessary hardware, and compatible software.

Currently, there is no fabrication facility in the world capable of making a 21 or 27-inch multitouch monitor to the specifications and quality that Apple demands. Given time, Wintek should be able to build such a monitor using the technology behind the iPad, but not in the immediate future. 

Even if a multitouch monitor could be constructed in massive quantities, the current build of OS X is woefully unprepared for sensible multitouch control. Like it or not, the solution is within iPhone OS. For a glimpse of OS X 10.7, I would look to iWork on the iPad for guesses, but otherwise I’d say any UI conventions remain murky.

It’s going to be interesting to see where this goes in the coming months and years, but I’d bet good money that Apple is going to begin deleting the mouse from computing.