It seems there will be a fairly robust gaming sector with the newly announced iPad - at least for the casual market.

Today, during Apple's media event, Steve Jobs introduced the company's Senior Vice President of iPhone Software, Scott Forstall, to discuss 3rd party applications - including a few upcoming titles and new features.

In terms of controls, games will use the accelerometer, as well as multi-touch, similar to the iPhone.

Titles from the iPhone are compatible with the iPad without any modification. While using ESPN's Snocross, and Gameloft's first person shooter, N.O.V.A, as examples, Forstall said:

"There you go, right out of the app store. All the apps you know and love will run right now on your iPad."

Select developers were given the iPad SDK only two weeks prior to today's announcement - to see what they could come up with. That said, it's pretty amazing to see what they came up with.

EA's Travis Boatman was introduced to speak about their show and tell title - Need for Speed: Shift. As expected, Shift uses the accelerometer for driving and touch controls for shifting, breaking, etc. While some of these features aren't difficult to program into the iPhone version, the iPad's larger screen size, however,  allows EA to add more features - such as tapping the rear-view mirror to see behind the car.

It seems there is quite a bit of potential for the iPad as a gaming platform. The larger screen is visually nice, but also adds more potential to the touch feature. This could also be a benefit for games that use the pesky virtual joystick that always seems to interrupt gameplay on the iPhone's smaller screen.

Make sure to check out our coverage of the iPad's full features in our iPad Live Blog post!

What do you guys think? Are you interested in the iPad as a game device? Or at least interested in some of the future possibilities it will likely usher in?

Photo: Gdgt