This year is the seventh straight year that Apple has led above all other personal computer makers in customer satisfaction, but ACSI has a special announcement this year that will probably please the folks in Cupertino even more. Jon Fortt of CNBC published a report today stating that the Apple iPad is in fact the highest scoring product ACSI has ever tracked.

I called David VanAmburg, managing director of ACSI, to get a sense for what’s behind the scores. He told me Apple’s overall score was up slightly because people like its computers and the retail support experience – but he also mentioned that the numbers included the iPad for the first time. He told me that the iPad, even at this early stage, pulled up Apple’s overall numbers – which makes it the highest-scoring product Apple has, and therefore the highest-scoring product ACSI has ever tracked. A caveat here: ACSI has never tracked iPods (because they didn’t fit into a neat category like PCs or phones) and it has never pulled out its number for the iPhone (though it plans to start as soon as next year). So it’s possible that those products would score as high as the iPad. But this is an important number nonetheless, because it suggests that the iPad and similar tablets, when they arrive in volume, could have a significant impact on the consumer electronics space.