Are they "real" though, iPad apps often feel better and smoother than desktop apps because you're not actually working with the real data they often downsample to fit within the small memory requirements.

If I drag a video file from my desktop into Premier then I'm actually working with that video file. If I open a video file in an iPad video editing app then most of the time that video file is then transcoded to H264 so the hardware acceleration can make it actually usable. Therefore adding a layer of compression.

It's not the real file anymore.