I have personally avoided laptops for years because I hate managing more than one machine. The one time a year I need my laptop, it's out of commission for a day while updates install or whatever. For that reason, I have a desktop and take an iPad Pro when I'm going to be away from home. The iPad is no computer replacement, but it can SSH places and can do enough work to justify not owning a laptop. More importantly, it can't have any configuration done to it. But if you already have a laptop, I would just skip the iPad entirely. The laptop is your "one device".
(Would I want a mobile processor as my primary means of doing work? Absolutely not. But, people seem to make it work... at the cost of being blown away by a new processor that's slower than HEDTs they could have been using for a few years ;)