Labtop motherboard dead? Please any feeback would be great

My wifes labtop hasnt been used in about two weeks. We took it out of the closet and tried to turn it on. When you first hit the power button all the lights come on for about 2 seconds than all but turn off but the labtop stays on. The screen never turns on and stays black as if it were off. I thought this was a battery issue but even charging it had no effect on the computer.

We then took the labtop to the Geek Squad   A lady told me that the motherboard was dead and that we would be better off buying a new labtop than getting it repaired. Another guy came over and ran some test but he couldnt get anything different than I could get.

Our concerns atm is that "if" we cannot get the labtop can turn on than we still need to get off the pics and music etc off the harddrive. Best buy told us that we needed some sort of external hub that we could transfer the data to my new pc or we could pay them 99-150$ to do it but the external hub would be about that much anyways they said.

Sooo I'm asking if this thing really is dead or not, if yes is my best option with very little computer exp to have best buy transfer that data, and third if she needs a new labtop would she be better off getting the new IPAD 2? She mainly uses a computer for the web with facebook email music pictures, skype, movies, writing papers or notes, downloading music (legally or not)?

Thank you for any feedback.