[zozbot234]

It's sad that we can only think of touch screen interfaces as "dumbed down". The affordances of a touch-centric interface have yet to be fully explored; at least in principle, there's no reason why they could not be made just as capable as a keyboard+mouse.

[canuckintime]

It all comes down to text input. Steve Jobs launched the iPhone with only a touch screen but he launched the iPad with a hardware keyboard accessory (discontinued after a year but then reintroduced with the iPad Pro). So with iPadOS it’s always really been touch+keyboard and frankly mouse+keyboard is better.

If Apple managed to offer a revolutionary input for the iPad (perhaps subvocalised speech input or a a redesigned touch/pen input) it would be the first step to a touch-centric interface as capable as keyboard+mouse

[zozbot234]

Gestural text input is very much a possibility. It was available on palmtop devices some 20 years ago, and these had far worse touch sensitivity than any modern tablet or even a modern phone.