The New Yorker and Time have finally agreed to allow print subscribers free access to the magazines on the iPad and probably all leading magazines will follow suit. New York Times and Wall Street Journal are already available to print subscribers or at reasonable digital-only subscription rates. This certainly makes iPad more viable as a magazine/newspaper reader.
However, it is still too heavy and too glossy to be practical as either. The other key issues is that the magazines still are mere images and not text-based. This makes sharing content incredibly difficult. The print media is making terrible use of a new platform. Instead of making words come alive, like kindle, ibook and other book reading apps do, magazines have relied on scanned/imaged versions of magazine pages. This makes the 'touch' aspect of these devices sort of unimportant and hence killing part of the point of the new medium. The lack of ability to easily share or archive text further kills the power of the digital platform.
Maybe someday the iPad will be lighter, less glossy and the magazine publishers will reconsider their technical content choices. A man can dream...