Driven upward by excitement for the new iPad, which launches tomorrow and has garnered a slew of rave reviews, Apple’s stock hit $600.01 in early morning trading before slipping back down. This comes just about a month after it broke past the $500 level for the first time.

A stunning rally. Apple’s stock is up about 47 percent for the year, and seems destined to continue its ascent. Analysts certainly seem to think so: Earlier this week, Morgan Stanley and Canaccord Genuity both lifted their price targets on AAPL to above $700.

At $600, Apple has about a $550 billion market cap. At $700, its market cap would be around $603 billion.

And at somewhere around $1,072? $1 trillion.

Which is certainly a long way off, but not implausible. But another 18 months of printing cash at the rate it has been, continued growth in China, Brazil and India, and a few more big product launches — the iPhone 5 and that rumored HDTV — will bring it closer.

Said Canaccord analyst T. Michael Walkley, “We believe Apple is well positioned for very strong C2012/13 sales and earnings growth driven by new product introductions, including the iPad announced last week, the pending refresh of MacBook Air, an LTE iPhone likely in Q3/C2012, and potentially Apple TV in H2/C2012.”

New analysis of the market by Canaccord analyst T. Michael Walkley reveals that China’s wireless carriers posted a 30 percent sequential increase in 3G subscribers from the first quarter of 2011 to the second. In Q1/C2011 there were 61.9 million of them.

And in Q2/C2011? 80.5 million.

Clearly the growth trend here is strong, as the chart at right ably demonstrates. “We believe the 3G smartphone market in China is reaching an inflection point,” Walkley says. “We anticipate … strong growth of 3G subscribers in China will continue, as 3G subscribers account for only 9.1 percent of roughly 883 million Chinese wireless subscribers.”

This, of course, bodes well for any company with a keen interest in China’s smartphone market — especially Apple, which has been particularly vocal about its intentions there. As I’ve noted here before, it’s been estimated that China could represent a revenue opportunity for the iPhone of $8 billion to $9 billion.

In a research note issued this week, Canaccord analyst Peter Misek speculates that Apple (AAPL), which recently debuted an iPhone capable of shooting and editing video, plans to bring the same functionality to the iPod.

“We believe Apple is now targeting to enter the low-end camcorder market by adding this functionality into its iPod lineup,” he writes. “…We believe Apple will unveil various iPod versions with camcorder functionality. We believe this will drive sales not only for traditional MP3 players, but as a new competitive dynamic to the lower end camcorder market that is now dominated by Flip line of digital camcorders.”

Misek sees such a move giving a nice boost to iPod sales, which, as Apple revealed earlier this week, have been declining a bit. “On anticipation of this we have markedly raised our iPod growth assumptions and have raised our iPod shipment forecast from 50 million to 65 million units.”

And what of Cisco (CSCO)? What would the transformation of the iPod into a point-and-shoot camcorder mean for the Flip? Certainly not good things. Who’d want to carry two devices for music and video capture when they could carry just one?

But has the chatter obscured softening fundamentals?

Canaccord Adams analyst Peter Misek thinks so. Yesterday, he cut his ratings on 3 major players.

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