What puts it ahead of the Wacom/Surface drawing tablets which have been around for much longer? I'm not sure if I'd describe it as a leap if it's refining existing products.

Like everything apple it’s not that they made something wildly new, they just found a way to do something more polished than anyone else that then is successful with a specific subset of vocal people.

I’m not much of a digital artist and views in this space probably vary wildly.. but if I steel man the pro iPad case I think it’s a few things 1. Screen quality. iPads look better than cintiq bc the display in the iPad is actually pretty awesome. Like recommended by the color nerds for being the best color you can get for the price, 2. Pen distance on iPad your pen is closer to the actual pixels. The cintiq had more space between the screen and the surface, feels like you draw above the page a little. 3. Biggest of all is portability. Artists love desks but they also love drawing everywhere all the time. iPad is just better at this because it’s designed as a tablet totally. The pre-apple pencil Wacom stuff existed as tablets but from what I remember was mostly just windows laptops. So software wasn’t built for touch and wanted keyboards and stuff. Responsive multitouch and the os(and drawing apps) built to integrate it tightly is a level of polish Wacom couldn’t do as just a pen input system. 4. Cost cintiqs always cost a ton and a lot of them don’t even have the computer part, iPads aren’t cheap but are way more accessible.

Maybe Wacom has caught up with newer offerings? it’s been a while since I looked at their stuff. There are also totally reasons why you’d wanna go that route for some digital pen stuff (eg high end digital sculpture or texture painting type stuff that really needs the power and integration you can get from a desktop and desktop os)

As always, Apple didn't wholesale invent a product category, but they made the first product that synthesized all the right tradeoffs in a sufficiently compelling package that enabled them to sell tens/hundreds of millions of units fairly quickly[0].

- hardware quality wise, already the 1st gen Apple Pencil had the specs of the higher end tablets (12-bit pressure sensitivity, orientation, azimuth, all in a sleek package)

- you can use your iPad for a bunch of other stuff too, and it's super portable - whereas for the high end tethered drawing tablets, they're pretty single purpose, and they take up a bunch of space on your desk. This all matters to broke artists living in dorm rooms/tiny apartments.

- the Procreate team designed a tool that was really focused on the digital drawing experience and managed to make a high quality, affordable product out of it. The standard for digital drawing on those tethered tablets is mostly Photoshop, which a) is meant for tons of stuff beyond drawing, making it quite complex and b) has 4 decades of interface cruft piled up at this point.

Honestly yeah, there truly are pre/post iPad+Pencil eras in consumer tech for anyone doing work that involves hand illustration/sketching.

[0] whereas their competitors struggle to sell low numbers of units at terrible margins