This thing has been going on for a while unfortunately. If I told you "Here's an "air", a vanilla, and a "pro"", what would you expect? The vanilla is base, air is lighter, and pro is nicer, right?

Well, for iPads, the base has (had? Haven't closely followed them for a while) an older CPU for some reason. And the Air is actually a "Pro-lite", rather than a weight optimized version.

Don't get started on where the mini sits, or what happens if you want "nicer" features like 60hz+ displays in a small form factor... a feature that budget android tablets have had for years.