As I understand it, Apple's current answer to not having Xcode on the iPad is that you can now develop full apps in Swift Playgrounds and submit them directly to the app store.

It's an interesting approach - turning an educational/prototyping environment into something that you can theoretically do real work with.

Not sure why we don't have Final Cut and Logic on the iPad though - it's certainly powerful enough.

That's kind of the unanswered question, yeah. I think the other answer of "to run a simulator" isn't impossible -- the M1 has virtualization capability of some sort on it, IIRC, which might let Apple create a fully sandboxed environment for development in a future release. (I know that goes against App Store policies, but Apple can change those policies at any time, and of course can give themselves an exception at any time.)

The other, and maybe more likely, answer, though is consumer applications that could use it. On HN we tend to think about development tools when we think of "software that needs lots of power," but there's image, video and audio editing, real time effects processing, animation, all of that.

To run a simulator on it