I have never thought that Apple considered iPads general purpose computers. One of their biggest ads about the iPad Pro[0] even implicitly states that.

The proposition, in my mind, that Apple is trying to sell with the iPad to the majority of people who use their computers for social media, content consumption, and office tasks like email and Word document authoring is "you don't need general computing flexibility for the vast majority of things that you do".

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llZys3xg6sU