It doesn't need to be as good as a laptop, it just needs to be good enough to avoid having to also bring along a laptop.

If you’re bringing a laptop presumably you can simply leave the iPad at home. IMO, laptop + phone covers most use cases for iPad + keyboard just fine.

Plenty things a laptop is not as nice for as the iPad. And even comfortably replacing it assumes your laptop is similar in size and weight than the iPad, which puts another constraint on your device choices.

I’ll just pack a Wacom tablet too so I can draw and write on my laptop and leave my iPad at home then?

I used to have a Surface, it’s fine if you want to doodle occasionally but it really doesn’t measure up to an iPad for its overall tablet experience

There are better alternatives to an old Surface.

Sure, and the 2020 iPad Pro is better than the 2016 iPad Pro that I switched to initially. The problem on Windows’ side is the software. Unless Microsoft has found a way to get developers on board with their own modern UI paradigm, you get a good tablet experience maybe 10% of the time.

And their tablet friendly UI sucks even when Microsoft does it themselves. For example, the new disk manager, which is objectively worse in every way than the old one except for having big touch targets: https://mspoweruser.com/this-is-the-new-windows-10-modern-di...

Sorry for the late reply, but I'd say if you can attach a keyboard and do more of the tasks that a traditional laptop does, it can replace the traditional laptop. Then you have one device where you can pop off the keyboard when you are on the couch, and pop it back on when you are at a desk or need to do some typing.

Not my taste, I still prefer the traditional laptop form-factor, but Apple is actively pushing their (expensive) keyboards so its worth asking why not allow compiling of code.