Even just for emailing, GMail at least is a terrible application on iPad. For examples, cannot format anything, or view one email while writing another (that isn’t a reply).
I primarily use mine for
* Note taking
* Browsing/showing PDFs in a construction engineering setting. Nothing is faster or as flexible.
* Sketching for construction drawings
But the lack of good tabular worksheet and emails beyond quick replies pushes me back to my laptop all the time.
I have noticed they cut tons of features from the iOS versions and keep you from using the site if they're installed (and maybe even if they're not? That's got to be how I ended up with them installed, I wouldn't have done it by choice), which is super annoying and makes no sense since I'm sure it's all the same webtech crap as the "real" sites, just wrapped so it's "native".
Yes? I use a Linux laptop + firefox, g suite works great even for docs that have hundreds of pages (though I do use a top of the line Lenovo P series with an i7 and 32GB of ram).
Re web-tech: All iPad/iOS browsers run a low-perf version of Safari under the hood. In my experience anything Google seems sluggish on Safari. Frankly, I think that a part of this is due to FUD (Safari is not slow).
I still use FF and Safari for 99% of my browsing, but certain sites just require me to use Chrome.
Web views aren’t the same, neither is the JS runtime configuration, hence the performance differences.
Let's look at pharma. They have a ton of sales reps and relatively few people in tech roles supporting them. Similarly, they have folks in scientific roles that push all software to the limits with a few people supporting them. The use cases of the sales reps are very well catered for on iPad and reps make up a lot of the user population. They present products to customers (eDetailing), have some basic data entry (CRM), might browse a range of reporting, and do some email. Email is critical, but as a sales director, that's not where you want your reps spending time. A limited experience somewhat helps just reply or move on.
I make no claims that this is sufficient for sales directors or scientific staff. It is however very well suited to some of these roles. It's also very reliable, cost effective, and easy to provision. It's unfortunate that laptops end up being so complicated in comparison for this audience.
Main effect for me has been to drop them like a steaming deuce, but not everyone has the luxury.
With the magic floaty keyboard, even long emails feel fine on iPad.
Unfortunately, Docs, Slides & Sheets are pretty terrible, and fall far short of the desktop experience. For those apps, a Chromebook would be a much better choice. If only they made Chromebooks with trackpads as good as Apple's laptops, or even as good as the magic floaty keyboard.
Sheets is terrible. Cannot use the magic keyboard to shift your active cell (ie click a cell, type = and use arrow keys to find the cell you want to reference.. it just quits the cell).
Gmail and Calendar are great. Drive is also sub-par in experience when compared to Dropbox (probably Box as well though I've not used it)
Oddly Sheets is the only one I like. It is good enough for most use cases and simpler and easier to use than Excel.
I've never even considered using Docs or Slides.
Some MSPs I work with make good money just converting businesses from Gsuite to Office 365. I don't use either platform personally or at my work, but I understand why Microsoft is eating the SaaS email & baseline office tools market.
I don't think this is really very true anymore, and I say that as someone who moved away from using an iPad as my main portable. I'm sure there are specific cases where that's still a problem, but now that it has a file manager, USB drive support, a full array of cloud services support, etc. etc., this is just not a big deal.
At any rate, if you're a dedicated Microsoft Office 365 user, you can be working on the iPadOS version of Excel and using the same files stored in the same cloud service (ideally OneDrive, of course, from Microsoft's point of view) pretty transparently.
Yes, well, monopolies will generally try to sabotage competitors.
