It depends
I have the A12X iPad Pro LTE with a KB folio
If I exclude office work, it is my most heavily used computing device by a wide margin.
While I have had several iPads from gen 1 onwards in the past, to your point, they remained very lightly used - media consumption sort of devices.
Its hard to say whether it's the desktop like power on the a12x or the keyboard that made the difference - but its been a total paisa vasool buy.
Of course it is no desktop - and it be stupid to assume that it will be anywhere close to a desktop - but for many use cases (browsing/ email/ photo editing etc) , it works brilliantly well - better than any desktop/laptop if I may say so
The M1 Pro at the same price point would have been a no-questions-asked buy for me if not for the fact that the a12x serves the needs as is - or if I can find a proactively ready buyer for the current one