To say it's "unusable" is ridiculous.

It works perfectly fine. Only main difference is that, in landscape mode, instead of people seeing you look slightly down instead of into the camera (like laptops), people see you look slightly left instead of into the camera.

99% of people seeing your image in the call won't notice or care. Especially when things like your lighting setup make most of the difference that people do notice, which has nothing to do with the camera you're using.

Everyone's creepily staring into nothing anyway. Except those of us who try to look at the camera instead of the screen most of the time. Which means we're not actually looking at anyone's face, even though it looks like we are, which is another problem.

Being a bit off-center is the least of the problems with video calls.

Are you saying unusable because attachment to keyboard skews image centering/symmetry?

I use my iPad for video calls (Zoom) all the freaking time and it's fine, but perhaps that's because i have it in the tall orientation so the camera aligns.

Not to mention video calls (Google Meet, Zoom, Teams) kill the battery on an iPad. Google Meet in particular seems to be about 1% of battery a minute.