So now we can program on the iPad, but only with Apple’s approved language, on its approved ide.
Can’t a government go there and knock the wall down?
The main wall that I can see needing to be knocked down would actually be technical, not political. Something like OAMA[0] absolutely would not fix the lack of JIT entitlements or virtualization support accessible to third-party developers in iPadOS. I would not be surprised if Swift Playgrounds is either relying on lots of Apple-only entitlements or compromising on performance[1]. If we had proper virtualization, then we wouldn't need iSH; we could load up a real Linux distro and run a LAMP stack or Docker containers on iPads.
[0] Open App Markets Act; similar provisions were in the EU Digital Markets Act at one point
[1] The screenshots I'm seeing suggest that, at a minimum, your code runs in the same sandbox as the editor. Which means Apple hasn't added any sort of private API that would let Swift Playgrounds properly provision your app. Without a JIT entitlement, the editor would also need to include an AArch64 emulator inside itself in order to provide the App Preview feature. These sorts of things won't matter to casual programming use-cases but would kill a lot of the benefits of an on-device development environment.
Apple is not the only tablet maker.
I’d also hesitate to think of it as a way to “program on an iPad.” It’s a slimmed down IDE + visualization pane intended to be an educational environment for people wanting to learn programming fundamentals, Swift specifically, or how to program one of the robots/drones/programmable devices that have a companion lessonbook.
Now it is a full development tool that lets you release commercial apps.