I think it's very easy to take a narrow view of "professional" here. iOS may never be a viable macOS replacement for programmers (although I don't think I'd pla

I think it's very easy to take a narrow view of "professional" here. iOS may never be a viable macOS replacement for programmers (although I don't think I'd place money on that), but there are professionals out there right now editing podcasts with Ferrite, editing videos with LumaFusion, doing multitrack music sequencing with Beat Maker, editing photos with Lightroom (and a host of other apps), writing Hollywood screenplays with Slugline or novels with Scrivener -- and doing a lot of more "mundane" work that is nonetheless absolutely professional level with Microsoft Office, Keynote, OmniGraffle, and others. What an iPad will absolutely never do is mimic an existing workflow. People who try to do that are going to hit brick walls fast. I wouldn't be surprised to see full-fledged programming environments on iOS in the next few years (and to see iOS itself open up in possibly surprising ways), but I suspect they aren't going to look much like the programming environments we're used to. I'm glad people love their Surfaces. They look like great devices. And, yeah, I wish I could do web development more easily on my iPad. But I'm a technical writer and a fiction writer, do both professionally, and have used the iPad to do (gasp) real work in both fields.