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.