Why pay these idiots any mind at all. Would it really take Apple that long to rebuild a clock app or a stock app? It seems inconceivable.

If this little bit of speculation is even half-true, there are so many better replacement apps available, who'd miss Apple's?

It WOULD be nice to be able to delete Apple's default apps from my iPod touch!

...Gruber has a pretty good track record on these sorts of things. I wouldn't dismiss this out of hand, and the lack of any reference to these apps in publicly-available screenshots supports what he's saying. We're not talking about the typical ignorant "analyst" that so often pollutes MacNN articles these days.

Anyhow, it's not that Apple couldn't rebuild these, and if you read what Gruber has written he says as much. It's quite likely that this is a conscious design decision, based on a choice to hold them back for other reasons (I'd like to see some sort of Dashboard-like interface for such things, though rumors to that effect aren't grounded in anything but speculation). We probably won't know why until iPhone OS 4.0 comes out, though.

I am not going to be able to track my hours. Hmmm, is it going to have the ability like the iPhone to track battery performance per charge?

If this is true, and they aren't working on bigger and better replacements, this is IMO a retrograde step. Currently I use my iPhone in client meetings with the apps mentioned, the only problem being the small screen display. I really was hoping to use the iPad as an iPhone replacement in client presentations and as a quick lookup device. The stocks app will be sorely missed, as will clock timer and helpful little things like weather.app and so on.

I bet this fool just downloaded the iPhone/iPad SDK from some torrent site, threw on the iPad simulator and noticed that it doesn't come with Stocks, Weather etc. - and from that he gathered the final iPad must have these apps missing as well. Or is there any FACT in his ramblings?

@SwissMac, don't worry..there is plenty of better, free apps on App Store that will replace Apple's usual apps (Stocks, Weather, etc.) .

I've got at least 6 useless Apple apps on my iPod that I wish I could just make go away (stocks, Clock, Compass, Weather, Photos, and iTunes), all stuck on a tab to annoy me. What Apple should do is treat all the apps as apps, rather than some as "These are from Apple and MUST be included" vs. the rest..

all of these apps are redundant as the first thing most people do is download better ones and hide to old ones. They made sense as bonuses before the SDK but lets move on.
On an iPad I really don't see using a weather or stock app when you can view the same info on a web page on a ten inch screen.
I can guarantee that there are several amazing stocks and weather apps for the iPad that have already been submitted to Apple and will appear April 3rd