I'm at RVC, in 3rd year now, and there are a few people who have ipads with them in lectures (there were suddenly people came back to uni with them after the christmas holidays!)
On one hand they look like a good way to annotate lectures etc. But equally you get lecture handouts printed for you anyway, so whether it would be any more use for you using that is dependent on you and your way of learning. I know some of my friends who really like having them, others just spend the entire lecture playing games on them.
I think like chocoholic says, I would say you are probably better waiting until you are here and seeing how you work/learn. Personally I know I prefer having a hard copy of a lecture in front of me, I will print journal articles off to highlight as I hate reading them off the screen, so I would just spend a fortune printing of things anyway. But other people are fine with working straight from a screen.
Blackboard is moving over to RVC learn or some other name...but will basically have the same stuff on offer. All lecture ppts etc online, with the echo recording of them available after the lecture as well, extra reading etc loaded onto it, computer aided learnings available online as well. Plus all the other sort of resources, potcasts, wikivet etc.... This can all be accessed on site and off site by a normal computer/laptop the same as with an ipad.