What is possible on a device should be driven by the creativity and will of its users, not by an artificial lock.
There is almost nothing stopping people from writing up iPad apps for coding things up, except for the fact that there is no market. Apple is no longer standing in the way IMO (stuff like Pythonista exists after all)
Is the context I described responsible for the lack of market? It may be.
I still think that iOS is the best mobile experience out there, but it's
It requires consciously designing everything to work as both a fully fledged computer and content consumption device. That touches everything from product design, internal hardware, thermals, operating systems, frameworks etc.
And what you say about 'consciously designed ...' amounts to nothing meaningful. Have you seen what hardware people have been running Doom on?
So does my watch, my fridge and my car.
iPad's hardware is already a perfectly usable general purpose computer. It is very portable, unlike your fridge, and has powerful processor and high-capacity battery, unlike your watch. The only problem preventing its use as a general purpose computer in a sense of Macbook is a lock by the manufacturer, which prevents loading a proper OS on it, and the absence of hardware specs, nothing more.
And an iPad is nowhere close to the safety-critical nature of the other computers. There is no defence for its locked down nature.