Apple tweaked iWork to run on the iPad—why not iLife?
At the moment, the iPad seems more focused on media consumption than media production. You can view your photos and videos, listen to music, read books, surf the Web, and so on. While the iPhone 3GS’s built-in camera takes pictures and records videos, there’s no similar way of creating media with iPad. As such, iLife programs like iMovie, GarageBand, iDVD, and even the editing capabilities of iPhoto are all absent. iTunes’s capabilities are mostly duplicated by the combination of the iPod application and the iTunes storefront application. While it seems likely that the iPad will feature more media-creation tools (if not from Apple, then from third-party developers), it’s possible Apple chose not to focus on that aspect of the device because it was more complicated to develop the interface for media creation than it was to do so for media consumption.
