Can you do any good 3d design with the pencil? Cad, sketchup, 3dfusion, blender?
The "clicking" device is not really the bottleneck in 3D design. Some people prefer normal computer mouses (high DPI), a 3D mouse (maps to 3D more directly) or touch (intuitive) but whatever.
The crucial part is key presses, all 3D software I've ever encountered can only be used in a efficient manner with intense shortcut using. On an iPad, that's hard, u either sacrifice a lot of screen space for non-physical keys, or use and external keyboard, at which point a laptop/desktop is better; especially with the second key element of smooth 3D editing in mind: GPU and CPU.