If you often do carry it (without the other gear), then I can maybe see it, though you can buy a used small thinkpad that can easily run the terminal programs.
Several years back I used my iPad remoting in to my desktop exclusively for about half of the year. There are terrible ways, mediocre ways, and good ways to simulate mouse input with a touch screen. The critical difference between touch and mouse is that a mouse can precisely hit much smaller UI parts (which, a lot of people are going to have trouble seeing anyways.) The Apple Pencil effectively does this — though not with the keyboard mouse pairing most are used to.
I’ve been using Clip Studio Paint on my iPad Pro for quite a while. Their iOS app is a 1:1 UI port from their desktop app. The app is basically Photoshop for illustrators and painters. It works way better than I would have predicted. Without the Apple Pencil, I don’t think the UI would be usable, but the Apple Pencil is the primary input device for the artist.
I’m expecting the iPad to behave very much like a desktop/laptop soon. My bigger concern is all of the software charging by subscription, which is a lot easier to implement with iOS than MacOS/Windows/Linux (kind of ironic that the unsustainable 99 cent price points makes subscription the only viable revenue model.)