Speaking to Kotaku at last night's official launch of the Apple iPad, Epic Games vice president Mark Rein voiced his approval of the large-form iPod touch.

"I am really impressed with the iPad," Rein said. "I was very impressed with the game demos. I was surprised how good they were considering they only had a few weeks with the device. I think iPad will be great for gaming and I suspect we'll see many games that make use of the differentiated form factor of the iPad."

Unfortunately he didn't say either way regarding the possibility of the Unreal Tournament 3 engine being ported to the iPad, suggesting Epic wasn't one of the companies that got an early look in at the device.

The UT3 engine was recently ported over to the iPhone 3GS with considerable success, and should the popular gaming framework operate as smoothly and fit the larger screen of the iPad happily it could potentially provide a powerful ground floor game development engine for Apple's new device.

"Apple has done a great job at constantly improving the user experience on Mac and iPhone so I can only imagine where this platform can go in the future," Rein concluded.