Who’s Your Daddy? IPad Rewriting Adoption Records.

Here’s another descriptive for Apple to add to the list of superlatives it uses to describe the iPad: Fastest-selling consumer electronics product in history.

Apple (AAPL) sold three million iPads in the first 80 days following its April release. Since then, sales have ramped up to about 4.5 million units per quarter, according to Bernstein Research. That gives the device a sales rate that far eclipses that of the previous fastest-selling non-phone CE device–the DVD player, which sold just 350,000 units in its first year.

If the iPad is able to sustain that rate of sale–and there doesn’t seem to be any reason to think it won’t–it’s on track to becoming the fourth-largest consumer electronics category by the end of next year, right below TVs, smartphones and laptops. And unlike those devices, the iPad is a CE device category of one.

“The iPad did not seem destined to be a runaway product success straight out of the box,” Bernstein analyst Colin McGranahan wrote in an investors note. “By any account, the iPad is a runaway success of unprecedented proportion….In an environment where consumers are facing the reality that consumption dollars are more limited than ever, they are making distinct choices. And they are choosing the iPad.”