1. I matters not that it is remotely. Wether remotely or as a local VM, it prooves that your claim that "It’s not suitable because of the modality, window management and state and data management concepts which are all compromises required for high efficiency touch driven mobile devices." is FALSE.

2. A keyboard is a keyboard and a mouse is a mouse. Remotely or inside a VM they behave as you expect the remote/guest to behave.

3. Bullshit, the Macbook Air has the same thermal envelope

4. Horrible or not, it prooves the formfactor is viable and desired by people.

5. An arbitrary decision designed to protect market segmentation.

That is a rather emotional response. What did the horrible virtualization ever do to you?

1. It's pretty terrible doing it remotely as well. I ran off iOS for a whole three months only for personal stuff. It's wearing gloves when you don't have to.

2. Yes and no. It uses finger emulation on iOS. There is precision control if you need it but the UI is designed for fingers not pointers and switching between one and the other is jarring to say the least.

3. No it doesn't. I have one. The MBA has a much lower thermal resistance than the iPad Pro does and doesn't even get remotely as hot.

4. It proves it was sold to people, not that it is desirable for any particular tasks. You can't draw than conclusion without more data which you have not presented.

5. Not at all.

As for virtualization it is a pretty bad solution for most problem domains. It adds overhead, inefficiency, latency. At that point it is illogical to use it for devices which require low overhead, efficiency and low latency i.e. most mobile devices out there. Taking the initial post into consideration, in what insane world does it even make sense to run a full windows stack on a mobile device when the only thing that matters is the applications?

It's an insane proposition really. I don't do it on any laptops either. Same set of compromises. It barely even makes sense in the cloud either where we end up gaining cost and reduction in performance. Containers are as far as virtualization should go at this point.

> Surface is horrible so I’m not sure why that’s comparable.

The Surface Go with type cover is an amazing janky device. It weighs almost nothing and has the CPU power to match, but I can toss it in my backpack and have a lightweight dev environment with me all the time.

It's great because it's has no software constraints, despite all the hardware compromises. I'd ditch it in a second if the iPad could run full macOS.

Virtualization is the only way they can give users a Mac experience while still being a walled garden with the associated security.

So may be they never will give us Mac experience on iPad (including the shell, forking processes, compile any program which include JIT, etc.) But if they do, it is very likely it is some kind of virtualization that contain the associated risks of those freedoms.

>I agree with apple. One of the reason iPads are so damn good is that they put some constraints on them to stop people doing horrible things. Virtualisation is one of those horrible things.

The iPhone was originally planned not to have any apps. I guess that would've been even better (and less horrible)?

No there's a happy medium in the middle. They took the approach of starting with a bowl and adding holes as required rather than start with a sieve and try and fill all the bad holes up.