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Upload your apps by 5pm, Saturday, March 27th, and the App review team will e-mail you with submission feedback about the readiness of your application for App Store distribution.

Well, so much for the very sensible speculation that Apple might wait until developers had been able to play with their iPads for a couple of weeks before the iPad App Store actually opened.

Actually, the announcement e-mail is so vague as to when and how the “grand opening” will take place that I wonder if they’re going to look at the quality of the apps and then decide when they’ll be ready to open — estimating when the apps can be good enough not to embarrass them.

Interestingly, though:

Only apps submitted for the initial review will be considered for the grand opening of the iPad App Store.

It’s really kind of a tortuous process. Upload your app now and we’ll tell you how far you are from the mark. But if you don’t upload your app right now and wait until you get your iPad, well, you’ll miss the grand opening. Because we emphatically want to see how well you people are doing. Now. Hurry. We wanna know.

Meanwhile, another sensible speculation is denied: I took a look at iTunes Connect, and applications that work both on iPhone and iPad will definitely be one single binary.

I haven’t installed the iPad SDK, so I have no idea if some mechanism makes it simpler for applications to switch context depending on which platform they’re launched on, but I suspect that there’s no such mechanism and you gotta handle it all by yourself.

Which isn’t the most horribly difficult thing with OS X development, but still a hurdle — and a good reason, or excuse, for developers to offer the iPad version of existing iPhone apps as separate downloads… that you’ll have to buy again.

(But then, if the iPad version is actually well designed, it might not be dishonest to ask you to pay for that amount of work.)