Rui Carmo is, rightly, a little less optimistic than most of the Apple-focused commentariat about the notion that Apple forking iOS to create an iPad-specific variant marks a new era for the iPad:
I have a profoundly different take on what "work" means than Federico-like one of my friends said the other day, there is a lot more to the "work" that we do than, say, wrangling Markdown documents.
The crunch will come when Apple find themselves needing to make a change to the fundamentals of how iPadOS works - like, say, removing or hugely relaxing the 10-minute limit on how long apps are allowed to run in the background (except for media players and suchlike) before iOS kills them[note]And expects them to leave a tidy corpse behind[/note] in order to let an iPad work more like a real computer would. I'm sure they'll start with a bunch of easy wins like that, but at some point they'll find themselves having to make harder choices and we shall see what happens then.
I'm not saying they can't do it - they certainly can - just that when the first iPadOS is still in beta it's a bit early to assume that Apple will do the right thing, especially if that right thing also has an impact on the user experience on Apple's most important product.