> If you're an artist who draws, I think they're serious computing devices.

An artist who draws might consider iPads to be serious drawing devices.

That's high praise since it's basically what Apple was going for with the iPad, getting out of your way to let you focus on the task at hand.

the supreme art of software marketing is convice your users that even your bugs are features.

the supreme art of product development is understand when lack of some feature is a feature in itself

WRT drawing, specifically: no, they dragged their feet on introducing a pen/stylus for years. They insisted it be a "touch-only" device (Wacom's patents on display digitizers surely did not factor in /s), which sucked for those of us who couldn't afford a Cintiq, but who had a perfectly good iPad 2 lying around. There were several valiant, if flawed, stylus efforts befor the Pencil, but with awkward connection, pressure, and power solutions, they were DOA.

Your complaint seems to be that Apple was late to the party (as they often are).

I agree that early third-party styli were a pain - I used various Jot versions, which were better than nothing but not great.

But the Apple pencil + Procreate is actually great, and a fulfillment of the iPad's original promise in the drawing space.

My complaint is that the idea that the decent drawing experience that we have now was part of Apple's master plan for the iPad is incorrect. They resisted it purposely because the iPad was never meant to be a creative device. The issue wasn't limited to visual art; people who wanted to use iPads for its other major creative application - as a music controller - had to use a number of hacks to break it out of the Garageband ghetto.

The core issue is the hobbling of promising hardware because it doesn't fit the platform owner's vision.

Better description: agreed

An iPad is an interesting device. It has many uses where it is indispensable, but most of them are unknown to most people.

I often see a sound engineer with an iPad on music gigs. The form factor allows you to walk around the room and adjust the sound easily to tame resonances and such.

It’s not so good for typing text or programming, but where it makes sense to have a portable slab of screen that works reliably there is probably an app that does it.

Lots of musicians use iPads for their sheet music. Vastly superior to carrying around several kilograms of paper, and you can use head gestures to turn pages.