I know it was discussed on another thread (or maybe higher up on this one) but regarding AirPlay, has apple indicated that it is a lossless transfer for the video mirroring ?
Of course it's lossy; with only 30Mbps of bandwidth (and often less in practice) you could only barely do 320x240 16bpp at 24fps! I think someone would have noticed
It's nearly certainly H.264 Main Profile at the native resolution of the device, or theoretically any resolution up to 720p (since the Apple TV doesn't support 1080p yet). Apple claims the Apple TV can only decode streams with bitrates up to 5Mbps, but I think it's actually higher than that, so who knows what the bitrate is actually like.
Also does the ipad send out 1024x768 wirelessly and the itv handles the upshift to hd , or does it ship out hd natively over the wireless, like it does over the hdmi connection
Who knows - since Apple controls both ends and won't be bandwidth limited below 720p, it doesn't really matter.
The other discussion indicated that there was acceptably small delay in control input being reflected on screen, but i'm not sure whether that was more a commentary on the speed of sending the control info, than any delay in the video.
Not sure what you mean there. There's a video on YouTube where someone does video mirroring of a video game with AirPlay. He obviously uses the tablet as the controller and both are visible at the same time in the video. The delay between the two is clearly quite small - not small enough for a multiplayer ranked FPS match obviously, but low enough to be usable.
As I said, the best comparison is probably OnLive.com - if someone finds that to be suitable, then so is this. It should be about as good in terms of bandwidth and latency today, and long-term it'll get much better than OnLive could ever be - with the obvious limitation that the GPU on the tablet is more limited and it'll drain battery life even more quickly than normal gaming.
On the other hand, we'll hopefully have at least 150Mbps Wi-Fi (SISO 40MHz channels) allowing for 50Mbps H.264 High Profile streams, so the quality loss on that front should be fairly low. Although if the tablet itself doesn't have two antennas, one very real concern is that placing your hand on the wrong spot will significantly reduce the WiFi bandwidth and result in missed frames and/or lower image quality. So it'd be nice if they went all the way to MIMO for that reason alone (300Mbps can't hurt either).
I'm skeptical it will set the world on fire, but it certainly makes for some interesting comparisons with Wii U. On one hand, Wii U's controllers will have better battery life and there's nothing else to use it for so you have no reason to try and conserve battery. On the other hand, by late 2012 or early 2013 and assuming Apple comes up wiht a SoC similar to the A9600 on 28nm, the iPad will be at least half as fast as the XBox360. Of course, by then a 2048x1536 display seems inevitable, so even if the tablet itself is used for 2D information ala Wii U, developers will still be sending a 1080p signal to the TV. So no way you'll have Wii U-level image quality in theory.
Technically speaking, it would be more interesting to do the 3D rendering on a Mac than an iPad. And either way I'm still more interested in what Apple might do via Apple TV. Mind you, since I don't really care, it would have saved me a lot of time not to write any of the above...
