The Tablet is coming tomorrow -- confirmed (by mistake?) by McGraw-Hill's CEO

If, a little while ago, you felt like Silicon Valley shook a little bit, don’t worry, it wasn’t an Earthquake or a tremor. No. It was Steve Jobs and the Apple executive team erupting with total annoyance, frustration and outrage at Terry McGraw, CEO of publishers McGraw-Hill.

Terry was on CNBC today discussing his company’s performance. It’s already a very stressful situation for your average CEO, so when he got to the end of the interview and the anchor asked a question about Apple — boom — Terry let it rip.

Engadget caught it all.

If you’d like to see the footage of the interview, here it is:

The first 90% is Terry discussing McGraw-Hill’s performance — the last 10% is where he discusses the Tablet. Engadget even transcribed what he said:

“Yeah, Very exciting. Yes, they’ll make their announcement tomorrow on this one. We have worked with Apple for quite a while. And the Tablet is going to be based on the iPhone operating system and so it will be transferable. So what you are going to be able to do now is we have a consortium of e-books. And we have 95% of all our materials that are in e-book format. So now with the tablet you’re going to open up the higher education market, the professional market. The tablet is going to be just really terrific.”

So there we have it: The CEO — the top dude — of a major publishing company confirms the tablet’s existence.

This was either a rather interesting departure from Apple’s usual tight-lipped PR strategy or a complete misfire along the lines of the other quotes we’ve seen from executives in recent months (I’m thinking of that Orange executive who apparently confirmed the Tablet’s existence).

However there’s no guarantee that the chap’s actually seen the Tablet. Indeed when Apple was allowing mobile operators access to pre-release devices for testing, I’m told that they came in huge oversized locked boxes that only allowed a small number of authorised technicians access to just the critical components. So that you couldn’t snap photos of the actual device.

I wonder precisely what Terry’s actually *seen*. Or whether he’s obviously heard a lot more.

Engadget points out that until the fat lady has sung (or until “Stevie Jobs confirms or denies it on stage tomorrow”) Terry’s statements could well be entirely inaccurate.