TVs have decent built-in speakers, a remote, probably more inputs, antenna/cable tuners, and a focus on large sizes, while not being so optimized for low-latency input.
> It should have exactly as much processing power as is required to pipe an hdmi signal to the panel and nothing more. [...] I'd even prefer it not have speakers.
So I think a monitor is what he wants.
If he truly doesn’t care about any of those things, then I doubt he’d be here complaining about it. So imo at least some combination of the above is implicit.