As other HN users have noted in the past, until Apple gives me access to a terminal where I can run the command line tools required for my work, I have absolutely zero interest in replacing my laptop with an iPad.
On the one hand: if Apple really wants the iPad to be a laptop replacement, there needs to be a way to do everything that a laptop can do. It doesn't have to be the same way; it might be a new way that requires a learning curve. (A lot of the "iPads suck because I can't do my work" articles I've seen really mean "iPads suck because I can't do my work the way I expect to be able to do it.") But if I literally can't do my work on an iPad, it's not a laptop replacement.
On the other hand: while I can't open a terminal on the iPad, I can open Blink and open an effectively persistent mosh terminal on my Linode. I have a Git client that can make a repository a document provider, letting text editors work with it directly. It's possible that there may be some things that the iPad can never do locally that I can still technically do "on the iPad," and that this may be enough.
I mean, yes, I get what you're saying, but I think it's at least plausible that the long-term solution for "doing developer things on the iPad" is going to involve network access and The Cloud™ for heavy lifting. (Granted, I think long-term, the distinction between local and remote everything is going to progressively blur over the coming years.)
[Edited to note: I think "Xcode for iOS" or an equivalent is almost certainly on the road map. I'm not sure whether full-blown web development of the "I am running a local web server on my iPad to test things" variety" is, although thinking about it, I can imagine ways a "LAMP App for iOS" might be implementable even today.]
You seem to be responding to a higher-level comment saying "developers are not the target audience" with "but it's not suitable for developers", which... yeah?
After all, iPhones have an endless amount of apps but nobody (or close enough to nobody) is developing apps using their iPhone.
In any case, you can develop fully featured projects for iPad on the web too, you don't even need a Mac for that, let alone an iPad.
Oh goody
If the rumors are true and Apple is planning to abandon x86_64 for their machines to switch to the ARM cores for everything, I'm going to have to pry the mac pros running 10.6.8 from the cold dead hands of our users to get them over to Windows with modern hardware.
It's really only the memory capacity that the Mac Pro's have an undisputed advantage on (4-6GB vs up to 128GB). Memory bandwidth is way faster (33GB/s vs 19GB/s) on A12X owing to LPDDR4 vs DDR3.
The latest iPad Pros are beneficiaries of a decade of intense R&D from the most profitable product in the world (iPhone). Form-factor aside, the chips themselves are stupid fast.
You can certainly attach a bluetooth keyboard to an iPad (I did so yesterday) and then they are pretty good for writting emails, but they are annoying to carry and a thin laptop is much better.
Just sayin'