I'm leaning more and more towards this myself, except for the fact I hate the look of most of them, and love my traditional watches. Maybe I could just keep it in my pocket. But it's ideal for what I want - GPS, WhatsApp, telegram, Spotify.
I’m waiting for the day I can have an Apple Watch without ever needing an iPhone to manage it, and an iPad to do real dev work (ie, Xcode for iPad) without ever having to fall back on a Mac/Book. I’ve been waiting for years already so now I’m not sure those days will ever actually arrive.
Depends on your particular flavor of 'real' dev. https://vscode.dev/ and an SSH app and a web browser.
My bar is being able to execute a compiled binary produced with clang/gcc.
Locally? Despite how powerful an iPad is I have no expectation you’re going to be able to do it anytime soon.
Now if these could operate in stand-alone mode... but both Wear OS and watchOS require a companion phone.
You could buy an older iPhone to use with it and just basically keep the phone at home in a drawer.
There is a mode for the watch that is designed to let you give them to family members who don’t have phones (think small children or maybe the elderly) but from what I’ve heard it’s a buggy hassle.