Emily Lipstein, writing for Gizmodo:
The iPad is pretty good—and it could be a lot better if I could get over the identity whiplash I get every time I use it. My biggest problem is that while it’s leaning hard towards being a laptop, Apple’s indecisions about its other qualities keep dragging it back into this murky grey area that doesn’t make it the perfect substitute that Apple’s marketing wants it to be. This isn’t about the OS or the keyboard. It’s almost entirely an apps problem.
The biggest (and worst) way that this rears its head is how the iPad, upon setup, downloads all of the apps that have ever been in your iCloud—even if they’re not iPadOS compatible. After deleting all of the superfluous apps that I don’t use anymore (here’s looking at you, flashlight app from 2009), I was left with many of the ones I use on my phone like Google Drive/Docs/etc (ones that seemed obvious that I’d be using on the iPad), but also ones that I use all the time, but absolutely suck on the iPad, like Co-Star and Venmo.
Lipstein gets the target market for the device (people who don’t really need a computer), but this seems like a weird stumble for someone in the tech industry. I set my iPads up as new devices, and deal with some installation inconvenience up front, for precisely the reason that I don’t consider the two devices to be the same. I certainly share some apps across iPhone and iPad (and Mac, for that matter), but others I don’t.