I do not agree that a picture on an iPad or tv gets away with being less good. To believe that, your perspective has to be simply that of other number crunchers who think in terms of dots, lines and pixels per unit.
I have looked in different mediums at pictures by several photographers whose books I own, and seen in a book or online makes little difference unless the printwork is poor or the monitor screwed. The great natural advantage transmitted imagery has is the same as that of transparency film vs flat print: the former gives more tones and inner brightness, a phenomenon also seen in the difference between a glazed print and a matt one.
In both cases, an uninteresting image remains uninteresting, not that I have books by snappers I think are not interesting. As I say, printing quality is probably more important than anything else in this matter; if you have Peter Lindbergh's book A Different Vision on Fashion Photography you could discover that many of those pix, seen on the Web, are actually a lot more pleasing. The book seems to be over-inked.
From personal experience, my trannies always looked better than the results on the printed calendars: you had to accept the differences in mediums. Perhaps the worst comparisons occurred in the case of polarized images where rather than a richer glow you got a flatter, darker printed image. I stopped using those filters pretty soon.
Rob