Does anyone know of an application that makes it easier to type on an I-Pad?

My wife bought me an I-Pad for my birthday and I really like it for surfing the web and watching movies when I fly, but I find typing on the thing to be laborious at best. I hate the way you have to switch back and forth between numbers, alpha characters, and punctuation symbols to type a message.

I love gadgets and the I-Pad is now my favorite gadget. I just wish using it at work were a little easier. I used to have this little fold-out keypad (from Targus I think) back in the pre-black berry era that I clipped on to my little hand-held what-cha-ma-dinky. If they had something like that, with an AP to go with it for the I-Pad, that would be great!

Has anyone seen or heard of anything like that?