I think the way you worded that is key. iPadOS paired with a Magic Keyboard will HELP you use the iPad as your main computer, and if you're a regular user of the more buried power features, you can trick it to do all the other stuff it won't do right out of the box. But for the iPad Pro to take over mind share from the Mac or PC in a truly meaningful way, it would have to be easier to find and use all those power features. My 67 year old dad is not tech savvy at all, but he totally understands how Finder works--nothing more straightforward than your standard file/folder hierarchy. It may be dated and boring at this point, but there is usually no confusion on how to use it. I also appreciate how Apple continues refining Finder to have more and more helpful and useful features. I don't use most of them, but I like knowing that they're there just in case.
Compare that to Files for iPadOS. I know how to use Files. I use it daily, and I can go back and forth between Files and Finder all day long if I need to. I doubt my parents have ever opened Files on their iPad Pro or even know it's there or what it's for if they do know it's there. They just don't think of their iPad as that kind of machine.
I've been trying to figure out for years why this has been such a tough hill to climb for Apple, and I think I've finally come to a conclusion: Macs and PCs are still uber popular because once the "home computer" became an affordable fixture in every home, we all grew and matured with their OSes. I don't know many people my age who didn't have a beige box PC or Mac in their homes in the 90s. In the year 2021 I don't know many people that don't have a smartphone. Both are paradigms that most of us got to learn from square one. So many people out there got to learn and grow from "system 1" of all those devices. This is why the laptop and desktop PC and Mac are still so pervasive.
Compare that to the iPad. Steve Jobs told us in 2010 that the iPad is that perfect device to sit between the iPhone and the Mac. You sit on the couch with it and read, you flip through your photos on that big beautiful screen, you watch Netflix in bed without processor heat burning your leg hairs off, the list goes on. The need for that kind of device clearly became significantly less as iPhones got bigger and Macs got thinner, lighter, and more portable. Then 5 years later, the iPad Pro comes in as a really souped up version of the standard iPad. Eventually we got iPadOS, which was a move I LOVED. But the features that transformed iOS for iPad into iPadOS were brand new, not super discoverable or easy to learn at first by the average user, and not even always heavily promoted by Apple other than marketing on their website and TV commercials showcasing the Apple Pencil.
This isn't a knock on the iPad or modern day Apple by any means. I love both and probably always will. I think it's more of a criticism of Steve Jobs for not realizing that if he wanted the iPad to reach the kind of ubiquity that the PC and Mac enjoy, he needed to start planting these seeds from day 1. Maybe we should have started from a more iPadOS kind of system and grown from there. Instead I sometimes think Apple is still fighting really hard to convince "regular" users that the iPad can replace their laptop or desktop, and I think the only real way they're going to do that is if the iPad and MacBook morph together into a completely new kind of device that levels the entire playing field. I'm guessing we're at least 3 years away from that point.
