The latest rumour says a Mac Tablet is due in September or October this year. Due to run OS X, inexplicably equipped with a slot loading Superdrive and an Intel Atom chip, will it be a Mac Tablet or a large iPhone?

Although Apple has had patents on Mac Tablet style devices for years, with one of the most recent from 2005, according to MacRumors, ZDNet in the US claims a ‘first hand’ rumor from a ‘reliable source’ says it’s really on the way – this time.

The specs fed to ZDNet US blogger Jason D. O’Grady sounds partially believable: a 12 or 13-inch touch screen tablet, full Mac OS X (not the iPhone version), a slot loading Superdrive, an “iPhone type” GPS chip and the likelihood of the Intel Atom processor.

Quite why a Mac Tablet would need the legacy ball and chain of a battery sapping DVD Superdrive is unknown, especially when the MacBook Air has done away with such Jurassic-like technology, but if the September/October time-frame is correct, it could mean massive end-of-year sales unlike any Apple has ever seen before.

Of course, that will depend on the price, and just how smart the touch screen interface is, along with battery life and the ability to pair with a wired or Bluetooth wireless keyboard, despite being slated to have an on-screen virtual keyboard a la the existing iPhone.

But Apple’s iPhone touch interface blows all other attempts at previously interfaces out of the water. Even Microsoft’s Origami 2.0 interface on the latest UMPCs (ultra mobile PCs) comes nowhere near the iPhone true simplicity, and one can only imagine Steve Jobs would have any PC touch interface ready to blow our minds and get our fingers dancing across a large touch screen.

ZDNet’s O’Grady brings up the slip by Intel’s German CEO Hannes Schwaderer that a future “iPhone” would sport an Intel Atom chip, something that could possibly find its way into the upcoming 3G iPhone, but is much more suited to a true Mac Tablet computing device.

O’Grady puts a lot of faith into his leak-loving “birdy”, who has been “reliable in the past” at feeding him iRumors, but O’Grady then takes the safe house option of saying “nothing’s for sure”.

Please read on to page 2 where we look at the potential specs any Mac Tablet might contain…O’Grady then talks about all the cool things you can do with a Mac Tablet, including voice dictation, handwriting recognition and haptic feedback, as well as pairing with a Bluetooth keyboard for faster keyboard-based data entry.

If the Mac Tablet could indeed be paired with a keyboard, but had no ‘stand’ on the back, accessory makers would no doubt create them in short order, giving users the best of both worlds – true Tablet touch functionality in ‘Star Trek’ PADD style, or traditional keyboard input, presumably also with a wireless mouse if desired.

No other specs are yet on offer, such as memory, the number of USB ports, storage types and sizes (whether mechanical or SDDs), battery life or more.

We can probably surmise, given the iPod, iPod Touch, iPhone and MacBook Air, that any Mac Tablet would forego the consumer-friendly option of an easily removable battery.

But that’s about the only prediction we can reliably make. Perhaps a Mac Tablet would come with a built-in 3.5G HSPA module from Ericsson, allowing users to simply pop in their own SIM card for mobile broadband.

Naturally, other wireless options would have to include 802.11 a/b/g and Bluetooth.

But the glorious large touch screen and accompanying touch interface, along with what would no doubt be an ultra slim device, would blow the whole tablet market wide open.

Whether a stylus for drawing capabilities would be part of Apple’s game plan is yet to be seen.

But I, for one, sincerely hope these rumours are true.

Why? Because a Mac Tablet would show Microsoft and its partners how to do a Tablet right, and would dramatically spur innovation in the PC tablet world, while Mac owners smugly ignore all PC tablet options and just go with the Steve Jobs tablet flow.

We’ll see in a few months time – and look out for any potential hints come June 9… if Jobs doesn’t surprise us with a Tablet based “one more thing” on the day itself!