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It is probably based on browser user-agent detection that doesn't distinguish between iPhone/iPod Touch iOS Safari and iPad iOS Safari. It is not necessarily an active act of malice nor even anything more than "cleaning up" some of the user agent code.

This seems extraordinarily unlikely, google pays a lot of attention to user agents.

I don't think they'll tell engineers to make the experience bad. I used to work for Google, and it doesn't strike me as the place where that would work. More likely is that there just isn't anyone responsible for this; whether that's due to iPad being too small to be worth the opportunity cost of putting someone one it, or due to the more cynical interpretation.

Yeah, it would totally suck to have strangers attacking your ethics instead of considering the small tap targets on iPad minis.