One of the genius decisions of Jeffrey Hawkins was in being laser-focused on the price point of the Palm Pilot. He designed it to be just cheap enough to buy on impulse, which is exactly how I bought mine.
Edit: Hawkins = inventor of the Palm Pilot
The iPad wasn't positioned to be a productivity device though. The $499 price was a surprise, but only because all the online chatter was guessing $999. It was at best a Kindle/Youtube/Netflix device. The marketing for iPad these days reflects this, the ads explicitly say "not a computer".
Tablet computers at that time ran full Windows, came with a keyboard and had pen support which the iPad didn't for many years. In fact iOS didn't even have a file manager until 2017, or mouse support until 2019.
The relationship the iPad had with tablets already in the market was basically the same as the PalmPilot vs. existing PDAs in 1997.
There was the big expensive Newton, and chunky Windows CE devices with keyboards that looked like micro-laptops. The Palm initially felt more like a toy compared to them, and it never got all the features of the Newton for example.
Hawkins was very adamant on holding back feature creep. Prior to developing the Palm Pilot he worked on the GridPad. One of the reasons that did not achieve its potential was that too many people wanted a say in defining its capabilities, leading to massive feature creep.
Steve Jobs repeated this trick with various iPod models and finally the iPad.
Its original $499 launch price was a shock to the market because all other tablet computers were priced like luxury laptops. Apple came out with a large touchscreen device for the price of a PDA.
It’s a stark contrast to the Apple Vision Pro which is barely useful at a $3000 price point.