I happen to own an iPad Pro. As a software developer by trade, this is a complete waste of money. Actually, I bought it to draw. As a standalone drawing machine, it's best-in-class - or at least, it was when I bought it in 2022. But this hyper-specialization as "dumb computer for babies that happens to get to hold the Apple Pencil" leads to it getting a lot of entirely warranted criticism as Apple reinvents traditional desktop computing features while swearing up and down that they would never, ever, ever Just Put macOS On The iPad. Most notably, and most recently, Craig Federighi did an interview where he made analogy between that and a spork.
I like this analogy enough that I'm going to steal it to make exactly the opposite argument. The iPad as it currently exists is a spork.
The iPad was originally conceived as a spite project by Steve Jobs to get back at a Microsoft engineer he knew that was going on about how great Windows XP tablets were going to be. Microsoft's tablet computing ambitions actually go as far back as at least Windows 3.1. However, they've always insisted on giving it worst-effort resources. This being epitomized in the use of a stylus to get around the pointer precision problems of touch screens. Steve made some Apple engineers give him a tablet computer demo that doesn't use a stylus, which led them to buy the multitouch patent and rebuild the iPhone around it (instead of it being a clickwheel iPod).
Problem with this story is that Apple took Microsoft's managerial incompetence to be a fundamental law of computing. Steve-era Apple assumed that we would need to rebuild all our native apps for touch, because the user experience of Windows tablets at the time was dreadful. But nothing stops you from taking an existing UI technology and adapting it for touch. Hell, webapps were on iPhone before third-party native apps; and HTML was extremely stuck in the mouse era. (Flash could have been adapted too if Adobe wasn't braindead.)
When Apple decided to actually market a tablet, they decided to do the exact opposite of Microsoft. Instead of adapting a mouse-driven environment for touch, they adapted a mobile phone OS for larger screens. Within the original confines of Apple's marketing, this was fine, because the iPad was Apple's answer to the netbook - a short-lived fad of tiny, cheap laptops that people used before smartphones got popular enough to render them irrelevant. But then Apple started adding new features - keyboards, stylus digitizers, and even mouse support - that matched contemporary PC laptops.
This is where we get the spork allegation. The spoon part is a smartphone OS: an operating system that's intended to only ever run full screen applications on a small touchscreen. The fork part is a laptop form factor. Putting a smartphone OS on what is blatantly a laptop makes it a spork.
I think Apple has, at least at the level of individual engineers and designers, realized this mistake. Because every time Apple tries to make the iPad more powerful, they wind up copying the Mac. Or, in a fit of stubbornness, they pointlessly reinvent a worse version of what already exists. When the iPad got its mouse support, it came with a new deliberately imprecise mouse pointer that morphs to the shape of touch targets... I guess to emphasize the lack of precision that a finger would have? Anyway, the morphing interferes with thin tap targets; you can have things you can't click because there's too many things nearby that the pointer wants to snap to. So, of course, Apple... is just getting rid of it and giving us a standard mouse pointer.
Again, like the Mac has had since 1984.
iPadOS 26 is fixing a lot of the problems with the iPad's shallow emulation of the Mac. But it's still nowhere near actually being as capable as one. And to be clear, when you're selling iPads that cost as much as a Mac, people expect them do have similar if not identical capabilities. You don't get to say "well, you should have bought the computer that doesn't have a touchscreen if you wanted to do that".