I suspect they have some numbers on how much the ipad cellular is sold and how often that feature is used and they may be using that to determine whether it's worth it.

But now that they develop the chip in house, I don't see why they wouldn't include it. In fact, given they put an Apple Watch chip and extra display in their macbooks for a few years, I don't see why they haven't done it years ago.

edit: I googled, apparently Qualcomm's licensing fees are a percentage of the whole device the chipset is installed in. I suppose it's less of a factor now that some iPhones are more expensive than Macbooks though.

Yeah for a while I felt that a valid counter-argument was "modems are iterating faster than laptop cycles so you don't want to be stuck with an older modem" – but with 5G modems and all the architecture changing over to IP with LTE years ago, now you can probably have a C1 in a laptop for the next 5 years and be perfectly content without cell phone networks phasing those out.

ARM MacBooks before launch were talked about for 10 years too. Same with AVP. Cannibalizing the iPad and iPhone market is a big concern for Apple

It would just be an MVNO I would think, but still cool.

TBH Id sign up in half a second

You don't need a second expensive data plan. There are plans where you can get more than one device connected with.