I mean, Air, Mini, and Pro are all distinct form factors. It's confusing only to the extent that you might not know which one is "best" from a CPU/memory/storage POV. But Apple has succeeded for iOS products at least at making that distinction mostly meaningless: pick the form factor you want, then pick the storage capacity and sometimes the color, you're done.

The iPad Air is not a distinct form factor from the iPad.

Is the Air, the Mini or the no-named one the smallest?

My answer was that it was obvious but I went down a rabbit hole of comparison pages and learned the current Air is higher end than the current iPad.

My suspicion is that that there is no iPad 11 and the iPad Air 6th Gen (with an M3 or something, maybe an M1 still) is the base model going forward.

iPad 10 is still A14 Bionic, not Apple Silicon.

iPad is the cheap one, the 10th generation is $449 vs $599 for Air. And the 9th is still being sold for $329. Lots of people want a basic tablet for browsing and don't need power for pseudo-laptop.

The iPad Mini has A15 Bionic.

In another year or two, the M1 will be 3 generations behind. At that point Apple might well just eat a small BOM cost difference. As processes shrink the previous nodes get cheaper.

Higher end, but is it smaller or bigger? And what about the Mini?