alt Hacker NewsPhilosophically, yes. See decisions like hiding the minimize button, systematically eliminating menu bars, large highly padded touch-like control metrics, and generally omitting functions wherever possible. There’s also the mobile OS style top bar. It’s more customizable than iPadOS and doesn’t obscure the filesystem, but otherwise the two are very similar.
To me, UI look and feel != philosophy. And having a similar looking UI != "very similar"
iPadOS didn't even have overlapping windows until very recently. It barely has application multitasking with a highly compromised implementation. It doesn't even really have a central file system or user directory. It's missing a laundry list of things that macOS has that Linux distributions with also Gnome have.
Let’s not forget that most Windows PCs on the market are available with touchscreens and a lot of people do use them. The Windows PC market is full of 2-in-1 convertibles that do not exist in Apple’s hardware lineup. Gnome isn’t losing their mind by making their desktop environment friendly to them. Apple is one of the only laptop manufacturers that has avoided touch panels on laptops entirely, because they want to sell you two devices with heavily overlapping functionality.