If you had a friend/relative that didn't have much money, and was asking you for advice about which "computer" to get and they can only have one. Would you recommend an ipad? There is no chance I would recommend an ipad in this context.
Jobs liked to describe computers as bicycles for the mind. The ipad is a unicycle for the mind.
For example, there's no notion of rendering a video in the background, organizing project files independent of the application, a plugin ecosystem for creative software, and proper IPC between these apps. So even though the market is different, there's still a lot to be done to come close to desktop editing workflows.
I don't even understand why programmers are always so up in arms about devices like the iPad. Why on earth does one want to program on a handheld touchscreen device anyway? I have zero expectations for that, much like I have zero expectations for the laptop I do program on to be a good drawing device.
"I can't boot an OpenBSD VM on it so it must only be for watching YouTube, for sheeple consumers, not godlike 'creators' like me".
Meanwhile it's plainly great for all kinds of creation-oriented activities, especially where the real-world meets the digital. The sensors are great. Pencil is great. It's a really good companion-tool for all kinds of real-world work, better than a laptop (though actually iPhones often beat both iPads and "real" computers, in that regard, just because of the form factor) Plus it's got some damn good, often-interactive educational apps, some of which work better on a tablet than they would anywhere else. Much the hell better for several of those things than any laptop running a "real OS for Serious Work".
But no, it's just a Netflix console for drooling morons, because you can't easily HAX0R it to replace the lock screen with a port of DOOM, since if you can't do that then it must not be any use for creating things. Give me a break.
My original point was that productivity apps, whether its photo/video/audio editing, word processing, or 3D modeling, all categorically benefit from features like better file management, IPC, background processing, working with external displays, easier keyboard/trackpad navigation, etc...
I saw some things in the presentation around external storage and thunderbolt devices which look like steps in the right direction, but the OS is really not doing it any favors. I would guess that the iPad is successful among this demographic despite iPadOS, not because of it.
Anecdotally, these days my wife (an artist) does digital painting and photo editing exclusively on her iPad Pro because she prefers the software available there combined with the Apple pencil.
So the iPad Pro actually does make sense for color timing and proofs and working in DaVinci Resolve etc? If the display is relevant for this, damn straight giving it a good CPU is going to matter.
People are going to be doing serious video color correction work on these things. I certainly won't… but it's going to start looking very compelling for that audience.
It has a great screen, it's very fast, it has built in 4G and the single tasking nature also makes it my favourite tool for writing (including coding, if I don't have to do UI work as well).
For me, it's definitely a creation device and one of my favourite computers of all time.
It's also infuriating because it could do so much more - but as soon as it starts multi-tasking properly it will lose some of its strengths. Same goes for the magic keyboard - I use it a lot but the utility of it has to be balanced by the fact that it turns it into a laptop, which is something it's not.
I've been a little confused about Apple's product lineup the last decade; does anybody else miss the foursquare grid of consumer/pro and desktop/portable?
Point is, the limitation is software. Even an extremely underpowered niche toy beats the iPad in a common, intuitive task for such a device.
Now, if your goal is "do dev work just the same way I would on a Mac or a Linux machine," then no, the iPad's not going to cut it in its current incarnation, for reasons which one can argue are arbitrary. But honestly, I don't think a PinePhone will really cut it, either. :)
(Digression on arbitrariness: Apple has so far stuck very doggedly to the notion that iPads, like iPhones, should be more like consoles than general purpose computers, and their decisions about the platform mostly make sense if you look at them from that "app console" perspective. That doesn't mean they're the right decisions, but they're definitely conscious decisions. Up until, well, today I was pretty sure Apple was going to keep sticking by this, and that their response to people saying "what about Xcode on the iPad" would be "may we interest you in this Apple Silicon-based Macbook". Putting the M1 CPU in the new iPad Pro under the M1 branding, rather than calling it "A14X" or some such, give me some pause, though.)
SSH via Blink is also not a very good experience (the keyboard is buggy), but it's good enough. The problem is when you want to do some local stuff, e.g., play some multimedia file, or do some expensive computation that your server is too weak to do. Only a fool pays +1000$ for a dumb terminal. (Of course, artists have their apps, and they are the sole group who are served by the iPad Pro.)
But, I'll take gentle issue with
> the sole group who are served by the iPad Pro
I also know or know of writers, photographers, DJs, musicians, and podcasters who do a lot of work on iPads. It was my only portable computer for over a year, and the one I took with me on sometimes long trips. I got real, genuine work done on it, and I am not an artist. I have my complaints with it, to be sure (you might notice I'm using past tense there). But I think the HN audience has a bias toward "ease of use as a development platform" as a primary measure of utility -- which happens to be a measure that the iPad does very poorly on. That's an understandable bias given that audience, but it's worth poking around and seeing what "iPad first" power users are actually doing with their iPads even with the occasionally maddening limitations baked into iPadOS.
OK but you are describing something that 99.8% of iThing owners will never do.
That being said, an executive at my company swears by the iPad Pro and he only ever uses it as a remote desktop device to log into his Citrix Windows environment.
(Ok, there was this one time with a Nokia N900, but it was just a phase =) )
My mum is never going to care about being able to compile a repo from github on her ipad. Neither are 90%+ of the userbase. The developers interested in the platform use a mac.
One will get painfully hot and visibly tick through a large fraction of the battery while not letting you look at anything else or look away from the screen without killing the 10s of minutes long operation while the other just does what you asked, does it quickly, and lets you do other things (on the phone or not) while it's working. And of course if there's something you don't like about the OS you can just change it on the phone. No need for some crazy setup process even to modify system software/configurations.
You might say it's not fair because iSH isn't running natively but it's your only choice on the iPhone.
EDIT: to be clear: even just running git clone on an iPhone in iSH can take upwards of 20 minutes and chew through ~20% of the battery on normal sized repos.