Last year, I wanted to buy an additional lightweight, portable computer that I could use for office work, as rebooting my Linux machine to work on Excel files (

Last year, I wanted to buy an additional lightweight, portable computer that I could use for office work, as rebooting my Linux machine to work on Excel files (without breaking them in Open Office) became tiresome. I tried the iPad as well as the Surface Pro (6) and eventually decided for the Surface. My main reason was that the Surface is just a normal Windows computer that can run any software (I even run Linux on it via WSL for when I need to do some light development work), while the iPad is a strongly locked down device where I have to rely on the app store to get and install software, and where I don't even have a real file system to work with (though I hear they improved this with iPadOS). That said the UX and performance of the iPad is much better than of the Surface, which will often show stuttering and input delays if I open too many apps. In terms of productivity it rocks though as I can do all my office work and some development work on it (and it has a pretty decent keyboard as well). So I agree with the author that there's so much potential for the iPad, I don't think Apple will want to unearth that though as they'd probably cut into their own Macbook revenue by doing so. Hence the iPad remains more of a "toy" or leisure device that's (IMHO) intended more for media consumption than actual work.