I'm not implying that work done in integrated suites or "apps" is illegitimate. I'm just trying to close the philosophical gap by explaining that this sort of work is a subset of all the work one might want to do with a computer.
What if your work requires detailed onscreen notation and drawing or requires mobility and a rear camera? These aren’t work subsets of a computer without bulky and expensive peripherals.
I have an older Surface with front and rear cameras and a pen. I can draw, annotate documents, and take photos just fine while using Windows 10. I can also use the whole universe of software available for Windows. Occasionally I might have to plug in a mouse or attach the keyboard/touchpad cover to use older software that isn't multitouch-friendly.
If Apple sold a device which was physically identical to an iPad but ran OSX (with some minor affordances to close the gaps between touch, pen, and mouse input- much as Microsoft has pursued in recent Windows iterations) I'd be ecstatic with it. I've considered trying a Modbook, but the price is a bit eye-watering.
Having access to a desktop-style OS would only add to the range of things you could do with smaller devices. Would it be harder to use than an iPad? Maybe.
You can put Linux on most Surfaces, and many of the cheaper Windows tablets. With pmOS, you may soon be able to put a desktop Linux OS on many cheap Android devices. The UX work for these use cases has been done - GNOME is now very much a mobile-ready and touch-ready environment, supporting real professional work. Plasma Mobile is not too far behind.
>What if your work requires detailed onscreen notation and drawing or requires mobility and a rear camera?
Then your work is not a typical example of real work, the same thing being a rock star is not -- even if people exist that are rock stars and get paid for it, so it's still "real work" in that sense.
It's you who want to enforce much narrower areas of work as characteristic of real work.
"Real work" in the casual sense (what most people consider work, or work most people's work is like) is what agrees with the statistically wider kinds of work people do.
This also has nothing to do with gatekeeping. People still get to be stunt drivers and rock stars and vloggers paid to eat their lunch live on YouTube, whether we consider what they do representative of "real work" or not.
It's real work in the sense of it involves real effort (work here used as in the phrase "hard work").
But "Real work" for the purposes of this thread is work that is representative of what most people do / realistic for people to have -- and statistically speaking, being a rock star is neither common, not representative of the kind of job most people do.
To recap the argument made:
A: People can't do real work on the iPad because it lacks X.
B: Really? And what about the people that are Y, they don't need X feature.
A: Well, Y is not real work.
What the person A says is not that (a) Y doesn't exist, (b) nobody has Y as their role, (c) nobody makes money by doing Y (and it is thus, their work).
The charitable interpretation, which is obvious since we're talking about e.g. "fighting aliens" (which indeed, is not a "real work" in any sense of the term), is that A means Y is not really representative of the work most people do, and that the percentage of people doing Y is small to not count for the purposes of how useful an iPad is for real work.