Microsoft Lightswitch is a Rapid Application Development environment currently in beta 2. It will be part of the Visual Studio family. There seem to be several different ways to deploy LightSwitch applications. I would like a web only application that clients would access on tablets, and by tablets I mean the iPad. If LightSwitch requires Silverlight that would rule out LightSwitch.
The client layer of a LightSwitch application is a Silverlight application. Thus, you need on Silverlight on the client to run a LightSwitch application.
Currently Silverlight is not available on the iPad and you will not be able to run a LightSwitch application on the iPad. Perhaps in the future the Mono team will make it possible given that Monotouch and Moonlight already exists, but I wouldn't count on it.
Fast forward to 2013 the LightSwitch HTML client is now available as part of Visual Studio 2012 Update 2.