A couple of days ago, a bunch of screenshots of iPad apps from Apple’s App Store were leaked out, and one thing that caught everyone’s attention was the fact that the iPad apps were markedly more expensive than iPhone apps. Now this is to be expected since iPad apps are more complicated with more features and hence are more costly.

Here’s a bunch of observations gleaned from the leaked pictures, and what you can expect come April 3:

• A new platform is effectively a new world, so app prices are probably going to shift rapidly as developers feel out what people will pay (probably downward, though devs are hoping against another downward spiral)

• Prices are generally going to start out higher, though a few developers will push universal iPhone/iPad apps instead of double-dipping

• App names and versions are going to get ugly

Let’s think back to the very beginning of the App Store. Nobody knew what an iPhone app should cost, so developers felt out the market, with $10 Twitter apps, and the like. Then, over the course of a year, the average prices of apps cratered so that cheap and easy ruled the market, and the App Store economy became a problem for developers trying to compete in a world of “ringtone apps.”

It makes sense that with a bigger screen, a more capable platform, and more sophisticated applications, developers might try to reset the ringtone app mindset. The iPad is a real computer thing, not a totally mobile device. People are going to be engaged—deeper attention, for longer periods of time. Apps for that kind of attention will require more resources to develop, so developers will rightfully try to charge more, and there’s going to be another period of feeling out the market, as people figure out how they’re going to use the iPad. (Though Apple’s effectively set $10 as the de facto price for a full-featured iPad application with iWorks.)

Here’s a few apps with iPhone iterations, juxtaposed against what their iPad counterparts appear to cost. The jump’s dramatic in a few cases—notably, WeatherBug Elite had better make me want to lick the sun, since the iPad version costs 5x what the original does. Without knowing what’s new and different in these apps, it’s hard to gauge how justified the bump is. But there’s definitely price juicing for a fair a number of apps.

A really interesting contrast case, actually, is Marco Arment’s Instapaper Pro for the iPad. Originally, he planned to wait out launch day, but will likely be one of the first out of the gate after witnessing the textual travesty of iPad upscaling. A beloved app, he could quite easily charge again for the iPad version of Instapaper, but it’s going to be a universal iPhone/iPad app, and everybody who owns the $5 Instapaper Pro on iPhone will get it for free on iPad. I suspect more than a few developers will follow his lead, so we could see a decent number of universal apps, in addition to the developers going for another scoop of App Store loot (which is, quite fair, really, given the additional development costs).

A smaller point is the nomenclature for apps, in all of their various permutations. The pre-iPad App Store gave us multiple versions of the same app, based on whether it was a free or paid version: Lite, Free, Pro, Premium, Trial, and so on. Now imagine that doubled, to distinguish iPad-only apps. Already we can see HD, for iPad, iPad, XL and Deluxe. It could get messy.

Whatever happens, expect the App Store to look way different in just a couple months than it does the day the iPad launches. There’s a lot of stuff that’s just not going to get figured out until iPads in people’s laps, so we’re all going to come along for the ride.