Good change, then! It wasn’t a great experience for most people. iPads are rarely static home fixtures now, and they were the only ones capable of dying.
Yeah, that was always a weird choice. The one time I went on holiday without first checking to see which device was acting as my primary home hub it turned out to be my iPad, which I'd taken with me, and all my security cameras were "unavailable" for the week. I'm sure the system is supposed to just switch to a different primary hub in that situation (I have about 15 candidates), but it didn't.