If you use Safari1, you can easily tell gmail that you are on an iPad and see the new gmail user interface for iPad.
- In Safari Preferences, navigate to the Advanced tab and check “Show Develop menu in the menu bar”
- Load gmail.com in a new tab or window.
- In the Develop menu, navigate to the “Other” option at the bottom of the User Agent sub-menu
- Enter “Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU iPad OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7E18 Safari/528.16”
- Refresh the gmail.com page
- Enjoy!
1. You can do this with any HTML 5 capable browser.