To buy one device that one can't figure out any use for may be regarded as a misfortune. To buy two looks like carelessness.

-- Lady Bracknell

They are solid for audio production too, with a lot of fairly powerful DAWs. (Like AUM or Loopy Pro.) you can even connect MIDI instruments from other apps into the DAW and then play them with a connected midi controller, add USB audio interfaces for multitrack recording and live performances, etc.

Or it can be a glorified PDF reader for sheet music (with a nice pencil to boot)… and it’s also great for drawing.

They’re very powerful devices. Sure, iOS is limited, with poor multitasking workflows. But you can still write very powerful apps for iOS.

My Samsung tablet replaced my dead netbook, it is perfectly fine for the occasional computing needs I had during travel, that I originally bought the netbook for.

I get to watch hardware accelerated videos, that the Linux distros on the netbook never managed to after Flash was gone never managed to get VAPI working.

I get to play games, designed for Android, without needing to translate Windows/DirectX on the go, because studios can't be bothered to port Android/NDK into GNU/Linux.

I get to read ebooks and take notes with the pen.

The detachable keyboard is good enough for short sessions of writing documents, sheets, travel planing, playing with shader code, python and C# development snippets on the go.

I am an avid iPad Pro user (on #3) but it took me making a concerted effort to unlearn over three decades of my understanding of what a computer is to me, my old standby app favorites, and to be willing to force myself to use the new instead of leaning on the comfortable old. Prior to that I’ll admit that it was an entertainment device. Now it can basically serve all of my computing needs.

What caused me to make the switch is the portability, battery, immediacy, and cellular option. For me it provides the utility of a smartphone and laptop, but with a better form factor

I hated it at first but its use quickly became second nature. Caveat here is I no longer write code or require total configurability into the bowels of the machine…and to date, for me, I haven’t found a computing task that I need or want to do that it cannot handle.

I see visual artists and musicians having some decent use cases for them. Everyone I know who has an iPad that isn’t one of these professions is usually using it as an expensive portable streaming device

I use mine all the time for taking notes, keeping up with my calendar, and just for staying organized in general. The Apple Pencil is so smooth and natural.