I know there’s a lot of hate for them on the forums, but I love my iPad. I know people say they are like smartphones but bigger. It’s the bigger screen that makes it better. My eyes get tired after too much phone use. What a tablet does that a smart phone can’t is display things larger than the palm of my hand.
There are a few things I can’t do on the iPad, but I have an old craptop for that. Mostly it’s printing things and I could probably print from the iPad if I cared to buy a new printer that has Bluetooth. I have post market Bluetooth keyboard that makes writing long blocks of text as easy as on a laptop.
If I needed to do actual work at home it might be different, but for what I do, I would rather have my iPad than a small laptop. I don’t think I can use excel or similar, but the built in word processor program does all I need.
What I do find annoying about the iPad is that after a while, Apple stops supporting the old versions and you can’t really update them. However, the hardware is still fine. I have a first gen iPad that crashes every time you try and use the internet, but is going strong otherwise. It has a nice retirement life as a digital photo frame.