Is the hardware capable of letting you do coding and what not? Sure. But at the limitation of keeping it appealing to the masses? Probably not.
It's simple. There is more money to be made on the average consumer than the much rarer programmer/power user.
If you don't like that then I guess you should be happy there are alternatives that maybe one day will do what you want. But as it stands, not even Android (the "power user" OS, if you want to even call it that) doesn't even do what you want without rooting it.
Point is, what the GP wants isn't really something we'll see for the time being. Being cranky about it isn't going to change things.
And really, that's all you'd need to do to satisfy me.
The hardware is perfectly capable of what I would need to use it for. However, the software unnecessarily cripples it. I don't see why I shouldn't be able to get a piece of hardware because other people don't want to use the software that I use.
Remove the artificial limitations and I'd buy one no problem. "Not in the target audience" be damned.
I would imagine someone will build a tablet (Microsoft seems to be on that trail) that will fit the needs of developers / power users. Truthfully, I am surprised there is not such a tablet offered by a company producing Android tablets.
That is a pretty recent example. They have been offering tablets that run traditional OSes with traditional specs for years.