You can type your calculation as a google query and you'll get the result. This calculator is designed for people looking for a mouse- / touch-based UI.

Note that the iPad doesn't ship with a calculator app.

(Equally annoying, Android doesn't have a simple stopwatch/timer built in.)

iPad also doesn't ship with stopwatch/timer/alarm like the iPhone does. The lack of these Apple apps is always sad to me.

iOS 6 brings those over (at least on the iPad 3, presumably because it made more sense than #ifdef'ing those bits out of Siri). I keep meaning to just write a non-crap Android stopwatch, because using my iPad as a 10" stopwatch is just silly.

Google Now has a timer built in

Sadly not, as its "timer" is actually just setting an alarm for x minutes later. That also means that you lose precision of seconds. If it's 5:22:36 and you tell it to set a timer for 10 minutes, it'll set an alarm for 5:32:00, not 5:32:36.

I'll admit that as I'm using my laptop touch devices didn't occur to me, just tried it on my phone and actually it works really well with touch.

But when on a non-touch device, even if you click on the calculator, focus remains on the search input, that seems like a massive UX failure to me.

So given this new information, what percentage of a load of shit would you now say it is?

I'd say it's now a 70% load of shit. Also, thanks for the epic comment, it's not often I actually laugh out loud on HN :D

It seems to be the correct UI choice - If you start typing, your input goes into the search field, and the calculator app is purely a mouse/touch application. Looks like a thoughtful UX choice.

Don’t forget that the preferred method to do calculations with google is to put them into the search box.