I disagree. I work in a law office. Almost everyone is issued a laptop, desktop, and, if they want, an iPad. iPad is fine for reading documents or e-mail, but awful for actually creating anything. Our office has found the keyboard is terrible, cut and paste is a pain, and people prefer a real filesystem. Nobody in our office does any real work (i.e. writing) with the iPad except reviewing documents while sitting in court or an airplane seat. Everybody I know just treats it like a giant phone.
Has anyone in your office tried using an iPad with a bluetooth keyboard? In my experience, it's far less painful. There's a reason Apple Stores carry these[1]: it's just one more (light) bit of padded plastic to drop in your bag, and then you can work on the plane and so on. (If you're at home, I'd recommend using an actual Magic Keyboard if you've got one, but those aren't quite as convenient in portability terms.)
I (and others in the office) have. You are right that a bluetooth keyboard does pretty much solve the typing issue, and using the actual Magic Keyboard over the floppy iPad-specific keyboards gets it significantly closer to the feeling people are accustomed to. Definitely necessary if you are going to be working on a document (or replying to an e-mail with more than a sentence), but for myself there was still a huge productivity barrier by having to go from the keyboard to screen for mouse actions (scrolling, selecting text, hitting a button). The keyboard/trackpad combination allows both typing and mouse actions with minimal movement on the same plane. It sounds a bit lazy or silly, but I found having to pick one's hand up and poke something on the screen was pretty disruptive.
Because you don't always have to use it like a laptop; most of the time you're not editing, so most of the time you're not using the keyboard.
This is the same as, say, people who prefer to use laptops docked to a large screen with an external keyboard and mouse. Most of the time, they can get away without needing all that, which is why they have a laptop instead of a desktop PC plugged into the same peripherals. But sometimes, for an especially heavy-duty task, it's good to be able to temporarily assume the next form-factor up.
There's no such thing as a docking stations for MacBooks.
(There are USB docks but they cannot really compete with real docks as they are available for PC notebooks. And Apple does not sell an external Retina screen either.)
I disagree. There are a number of options here, but my personal favorite is the Belkin TB2 dock. Plug in two cables (power/TB) and I have three external screens, wired keyboard, multiple USB3 plugs, gigabit Ethernet, and a decent audio line out.
If you prefer something exactly like a dock where no cables are involved being plugged in manually, there are several solutions available. Henge Docks, Landing Zone, and BookEndz are some examples.
A Thunderbolt dock is very functional for a laptop. You can hang a large display, keyboard, backup storage, and wired ethernet off the dock and just plug in two cables -- Thunderbolt and power. Various OS niceties make it work well.