They have Photoshop on the iPad and Adobe says it’s “built with a no compromise in quality and performance”. Which means buggy as any Adobe product but useable. It really can’t get worse than Lightroom on an older intel Mac. An iPad Pro M1 also beat a MBP 16” with an i9 in Geekbench for multi core.

Video editing is also crazy good on an iPad Pro and iPhones.

Well, video editing is crazy fast on iPad and iPhone, that doesn't make it good. Apple goes above-and-beyond building hardware accelerators into their GPU for video content, but the form factor of the iPhone/iPad is considerably worse than editing with a Macbook. I feel the same way about music production on iOS - the hardware is willing, but the software is weak.

Probably why she only edits 90% of her work on iPad. I think there's a huge percentage of non-developers who are exactly in this boat – can do 90% of their work on an iPad, and enjoy that experience, but keep a traditional computer around for the 10%.

Not every feature is used. Most use a tiny subset of available features.

That makes the iPad fill many many use cases.

I can do about 80% of my work on my iPad

Apparently they don’t need all those extra features 90% of the time. The ipad in conjunction with the pencil is a very powerful photo editing tool.

Yes but she said life is nicer somehow using the iPad. Maybe she can do the same on the laptop but she also has a nice garden she likes to do her work in, vs the iMac is my understanding