> Maybe sideload your specialised kiosk software onto it by hand?
In this case I was suggesting that you have a vendor upstream of you doing this, where you then take receipt of a system (e.g. a POS system) of which an "embedded" iPad is a one component, and is a black box, perhaps even epoxied into an enclosure.
In such a case, you literally cannot do anything to the iPad. It's locked down into its kiosk application, and getting admin access to it would require taking the system it's a part of apart to a degree that would void your warranty with the vendor.
Instead, the only thing you can alter, is the network the iPad connects to.
This is a solution that doesn’t scale, and any IT admin supporting more than a handful of Apple devices in their network should look at MDM.