"Real work" is only real if it agrees with your narrow world view.
It's you who want to enforce much narrower areas of work as characteristic of real work.
"Real work" in the casual sense (what most people consider work, or work most people's work is like) is what agrees with the statistically wider kinds of work people do.
This also has nothing to do with gatekeeping. People still get to be stunt drivers and rock stars and vloggers paid to eat their lunch live on YouTube, whether we consider what they do representative of "real work" or not.
But "Real work" for the purposes of this thread is work that is representative of what most people do / realistic for people to have -- and statistically speaking, being a rock star is neither common, not representative of the kind of job most people do.
To recap the argument made:
A: People can't do real work on the iPad because it lacks X. B: Really? And what about the people that are Y, they don't need X feature. A: Well, Y is not real work.
What the person A says is not that (a) Y doesn't exist, (b) nobody has Y as their role, (c) nobody makes money by doing Y (and it is thus, their work).
The charitable interpretation, which is obvious since we're talking about e.g. "fighting aliens" (which indeed, is not a "real work" in any sense of the term), is that A means Y is not really representative of the work most people do, and that the percentage of people doing Y is small to not count for the purposes of how useful an iPad is for real work.
Then your work is not a typical example of real work, the same thing being a rock star is not -- even if people exist that are rock stars and get paid for it, so it's still "real work" in that sense.