I've used 3 Apple products for more than chance interactions. A MacSE for 5 years in school, a 2015 Mac desktop for 6 months in a printshop, and an iPad for the past 2 years at work.

The SE and desktop felt like modern machines, clicks and key presses had predictable results, applications did what you told them too. On par with the Win95 and Win 7/8 I was used to at the time.

Jesus Christ, that iPad on the other hand, feels like janky Windows Vista tech rammed together by an intern. Weird UI artifacts, making the same gesture can have unpredictable results, the only function that everyone in the shop found without failure was 'undo' because it is triggered by violent shaking.

Even simple tasks like sharing a photo saved from a website is bizarrely broken. Depending on whether you saved it as a file or 'to your photos' dictates which applications can then open/share the image. And I know Android is full of it's own foibles but they took a few months to internalize. I'm going on 2 years of 'features' breaking workflow, and pixel perfect taps to activate input elements that are 5% of the screen width.

/rant

Maybe you are right, but Apple is selling hundreds of millions of iPads per year, so just maybe most people are content with the hard- and software and will just adapt to some quirks.

I am personally not always happy with the gestures, but some can be disabled. I don't have much use for my iPad apart from watching some videos, for everything that requires concentration, I will fallback to my laptop. I still think it is a marvelous machine how the hardware and iPadOS play together.

Yeah the iPad suffers from trying to live on the OS made for phones. I have an iPad but rarely use it any more, and then only for viewing content. It would be far more useful if I could use it with something closer to MacOS.