The main thing Apple did with the iPad was make it work without any major gotchas. Sure, you could have stuck a desktop CPU and desktop OS in a touchscreen device. Other people tried that. It wasn't appealing.

The iPad gave long battery life, a comfortable form-factor, solid usability and reliability, an impossibly low price point for such high-end hardware, and most importantly it was a tablet above all else. Every app becomes the machine. That's entirely different than carrying a desktop around in an iPad-sized box.

Be careful if you think this is simply dumbing down a desktop, because it shows you're missing the point.