Thing is, you can connect a keyboard and pointer device as you note, and it's still just as hard to "leverage the hardware capabilities".
I'd be happy enough with virtualization, at least then I could make proper use of the hardware.
It’s possible to do SwiftUI development on device now, but god forbid you’re doing anything other than that (or even SwiftUI but it’s a real Xcode project already) then the iPad is practicaly useless.