Yes. It crops up every once in a while, mostly when you have a lot of contacts.
My recommendation is to keep your contacts synced with an online service like Google. You can do this by setting up your Google account on the iPad as an Exchange account, instead of the default GMail one. Here are the instructions.
Setting up Google Sync with your iOS device : Mail, Calendar, & Contacts - Google Mobile Help
Google also has the ability to import contacts via .csv or vCard, which may save you a lot of typing if you have your contacts in another database and can export to one of those formats.