Out here in the free world, every time you want to use a library, you have to choose between 12 different options, all suck in one way or another, and you really have no way of making an informed choice. So you pick something by gut feel. Half the time you are wrong, and all of the time you worry that you have made the wrong choice.

But if you buy into Apple's cathedral, they tell you what to use, and you use it. End of story. It's always behind the times, and it won't run outside of Apple's stuff, but it works (for now, at least), it's well documented, and you don't have to spend days finding and comparing solutions. You can get back to writing code, which is the fun part.

Is it good business? Good for the world? Maybe not. But it's certainly attractive.

As a user, I don't miss having to search the general web to find something for my computer, only to be misled by poor results in the search engine, malware download sites, software that would be the perfect solution but doesn't run on my OS, ads everywhere, etc. Now I have one place to go and everything on it works with my system. Sure it's not perfect, and discovery could be improved, but there's no malware that I've ever run into, and everything I actually need is there.

Also, it's a false dichotomy between PC OSes and iOS. Both macOS and Windows have app stores that their users use.

Along with a million other apps.

I don't know about that; one of Apple's hallmarks is that they aren't afraid to compete with their own products. Some companies would have said "We can't make the tablet into a powerful computer, it would cut into notebook sales.

Especially with the USB-C change, these iPads are a serious competitor to Apple's laptops for pretty much anyone except developers. In a lot of ways they're better. Just not for programming because the software is still too sandboxed.

Here's hoping that Xcode shows up.

I feel we are insanely close to this reality though. We have large enough displays now (even on the small one), external display support, external keyboard support and USB-C so we can actually plug in an iPhone into the iPad itself (Though this could have been skirted with the advent of wireless debugging support in Xcode. I'd still rather have the wire though.) Only thing I really want is some kind of trackpad or trackpad replacement. Or even just mouse support and I'll drop one in my bag.

Selecting/moving text with a finger is more annoying.