He clearly means real work in the realms traditionally requiring computational power. Except for excel, all the things you mentioned could easily be done with a

He clearly means real work in the realms traditionally requiring computational power. Except for excel, all the things you mentioned could easily be done with a piece of paper. And even then, good luck converting an xls file to csv then using a text editor to manipulate it on an iPad. Real computer work is making software or graphics that require either computational power (video, graphics, music) or access to the Unix shell (programming). The first category is ready to go, capability wise, on iPad, but like the author said there's no incentive for those companies to make iPad versions of their software. The second category is a non-starter because of the App-centric nature of iPadOS.