I don't think the remote workstation idea is a bad idea. For me, in order to be a proper development machine it would need to have a fully local IDE with a remote terminal so I can run docker, test cases, database commands, etc.

The VSCode Docker image recently discussed is a huge next step if the input and scroll were to be fixed.

I used to use the dev version of cloud 9 on my VMs and code in the browser. It worked really, really well. Getting that right for the iPad would be quite exciting.