OP here (not Paul, the blog author): I am surprised by the amount of attention this has had!

I understand the iPad can be a useful dev environment if one is using one of the Web IDEs, e.g. https://aws.amazon.com/cloud9/?origin=c9io

What about an IDE that runs natively on the iPad using asm.js or Web assembly, with remote storage for files, and ssh for running on a remote dev machine? Even better, what about a complete local Linux environment, including gcc, using something like: https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?cpu=riscv32&url=https://...

Does this exist, or still a pipe dream?