This is outdated info. The latest iPad Pro has the M1 chip, exactly the same as the MacBook. And it comes in 8/16gb ram.

The magic keyboard accessory apple sells for the iPad also turns it in to the same form factor as a laptop.

You very realistically could replace a MacBook with an iPad Pro and magic keyboard if apple let people run macOS on it.

As an iOS (and Android) user and developer since about the iPad2, iPads interest me less the more iOS shifts toward being a general-purpose OS. I wouldn't buy one with macOS or equivalent on it, even if it'd been modified to work well on touch screens. At that point I'd probably get the cheapest large Android tablet I could find as a PDF reader, and just... not do the other stuff I do with iPads at all, I guess.