I had to use an iPad with the Magic Keyboard as a laptop replacement for a week, since my only laptop (MacBook) was in repair for that time.

I really, really, really missed having an actual laptop. I lost the ability to:

* Listen to music while watching a video (iPadOS does not allow multiple audio sources at once; playing a YouTube video while playing a song on Apple Music wasn't allowed)

* Quickly edit photos (I had 400 GB+ photos to cull/cut down; Lightroom for iPad required me to transfer photos to internal storage before culling to upload to cloud storage first, and I didn't have enough room; and specialized software for culling on the iPad equivalent to FastRawViewer that may or may not have worked all had a subscription fee)

* Easily search for files (Files search was far slower and unreliable, especially with files split between OneDrive, iCloud Drive, and Google Drive), and manage files in general

* Edit videos with the features I needed (Premiere Pro lacked features on iPad and other video editor alternatives had no iPad equivalents), or simply easily edit videos due to friction in file management

* Use video-recording software like OBS to record a presentation

* Use all features of flashcard software named Anki; I could not export individual decks or use other features (desktop-only feature; the iOS and browser versions did not have this)

* Easily manage and resize having multiple windows on the screen at once (a two-second window arrangement took 10+ seconds, with constant hold-and-dragging and precise dragging at specific changing corners required)

* Quickly and easily extract text from images for translation elsewhere (which added difficulties for language learning)

* Run certain internet browser extensions

* Compile and edit source code for software

And so on. I'll grant that many users won't need many of these features. But at the very least, the ability to find files and manage windows is essential, yet it's still so cumbersome with iPads versus laptops years after the first iPadOS release.

I fundamentally think that computers should work for you, and you shouldn't need to change your habits and workflow due to OS limitations (losing the ability to simply listen to music while watching a video was the biggest one for me). Yet I ran into so many walls with the iPad.

I don’t think the examples I gave were particularly specialized.

Enterprise is running what I assume to be a web-based CRUD application and the trial attorneys were displaying PDFs and other documents on a projector.

Besides code compilation I can’t really think of anything an iPad can’t do. Can you list out some examples?

Desktop Windows computers at a large corp are usually also really locked down by IT, and are incapable of being able to perform general purpose tasks.