Laptops are generally more expensive than tablets, it may be helpful for people with less budgets.

1) You may not have a laptop.

2) Your laptop might be your employer's. You don't bring it with you to the beach and on vacation.

3) Your laptop may not be energy efficient/small. Not everyone has the latest MacBook for personal use.

4) You may not have a keyboard at all and still use the tablet for productive tasks. Typing speed is rarely the biggest blocker when programming. Sometimes you just stare at the screen and think.

My point is that there are many scenarios where one may need/want similar solutions and a laptop is not a solution for different reasons.

OP's comment is like asking why not use a motorbike instead of an electric bike. Different uses/budgets/requirements. And yes, expectations.

For me, the difference is about 2 pounds in my travel backpack. Granted, I could just buy a lighter laptop, but for the small amount that I actually travel, I'm just comparing the equipment that I happen to already have. The tablet owes its existence to reading sheet music.

For me, it wasn't VS Code, but Jupyter Lab. Having it on my tablet reassured me that I could leave the house without my laptop.

Also, it was an amusing rainy day project at home to get it working. I won't claim that I had a hard quantitative justification, but wanted to know if it was possible. I would probably have been satisfied with Jupyter Lite. And I didn't even end up getting out the tablet on my most recent trip.