I downloaded the SDK and Simulator for the Blackberry Playbook today. A few quick notes about my experiences so far.

The first thing you should know if you are on a Mac is that you must have VMWare Fusion in order to run the Simulator at this time. The site notes that you need to download VMWare Player (this is a windows and linux only product).

The simulator is pretty bare bones right now, it doesn't even include the web browser yet.

Blackberry is providing a nice promotion for developers to start building apps for the playbook. If you build a PlayBook AIR app and get it approved on App World before the playbook is launched, they will give you a free PlayBook, details here.

Here are a handful of links that you might find useful to get started:

• Download SDK and Simulator
• Blackberry Developer Blog
• Developer Resources
• Your first Blackberry Playbook AIR App (includes video)

Another thing that caught me up was the developer mode password on the playbook simulator, however I got it right on my second guess (the password is password, my first guess was empty).