The problem with that argument is that it’s centered on the wrong issue. The issue that needs to be addressed isn’t that the iPad can’t natively interact with these legacy systems (at least not directly). The real issue is that those archaic systems are still in use. An iPad (or iPhone, or Android tablet, or Windows RT device) not being able to interact with a legacy IT sustem is really a symptom of a much larger problem. And that problem goes beyond basic access from newer devices.
When I started my last job as an IT manager, the organization’s staff entered monthly program statistics into DOS-era databases — a situation that required hiring a temp each year to print out the stats and manually enter them into Excel spreadsheets for an annual executive review process. The reason data needed to be printed and manually typed into Excel every year was that the product used to build those databases had been discontinued in 1989 and there was no solution on the market to migrate that data into a modern file format. There wasn’t even a product on the market that could open the files (nor could I find developers willing or able to build one within my budget).
