Unless you are a power user who manages to overload it so severely it becomes unusable (not hard to do, if you’re a certain type of power user - unfortunately), it’s basically just a big iphone you can attach a keyboard too.

Much harder to actually break or make unusable than the typical 5-10 yr old windows laptop from the lowest bidder most people interact with.

Basically, they're an appliance, and hard for a user to screw up.

Of course it's not actually zero.

There's always someone whose finger can't poke things that will ask where the mouse is, or why this stupid iPad doesn't run Lotus 1,2,3 -- and you have to respect their challenges. Or of course (rare) hardware faults, and you have to provision a new one.

But the appliance-ness of it makes it a support dream.

It’s next to impossible to get an iPad to a non-working state.

A creative user with a Windows laptop can do it easily unless it’s really tightly locked and controlled.

And sometimes Windows just does that on its own.

I thought with an iPad you simply can't manage it remotely. If you can, I want to know, because my father-in-law keeps screwing up his iPad and I can't fix it without shipping it back and forth.

You need an MDM to manage it remotely. Something like Jamf Now is $2/device/month. Not sure how much the shipping costs, but might be break-even

Sure you can. Look into MDM services like Jamf Now.

Splashtop will let you view an ipad's screen. It's fiddly to start (remote user has to allow access, enable broadcasting, etc every time, and this is a non-trivial step to get over), but it does work, in the sense that seeing the screen is faster than just guessing what is going on as your panicked user pokes randomly at things no matter what you say, leaving you with no context.

It is functional enough to be useful, if the other person on the line is good at following instructions.

How much spyware have you seen gunking up the default experience on an iPad? Compare this to a typical consumer laptop.