Hey Marc!
Thanks for responding. I simply do not think Apple wants the iPad to run MacOS. They saw what Microsoft went through with Windows 8 and 8.1 and do not want to make the same mistake. Having an operating system within an operating system is awkward when have two desktops, two file systems, two versions of Safari that are wildly differnet, etc. Android vendors for years have been also trying to make the “Turn your phone into a desktop” thing (Motorola and Samsung) and even then I’ve never seen it really take off. There’s a lot of complexity with that as well. You need to have a dock/cable, bluetooth keyboard+mouse, external display/laptop dock of some sort. Futhermore, you have to then graft touch into MacOS because people are going to then demand to use macOS on the iPad without a keyboard and mouse…which would require a ton of engienering resources that could go to other features to make iPadOS better… It all just gets messy.

I think the M1 processor is a bit of marketing and a bit of Apple future-proofing their devices like they always do. Architectually from what I understand the M1 series processoes are very close to the A-Series chipsets and its kinda vague what the real differences are because its not really performance, the iPad processors have been really capable for years, but for years Apple uses it as extra overhead for future features. That’s one of the reasons you see the iPhone 6S getting iOS 15. Just because the chipset is capable of running MacOS does not mean that its going to be a good end-user experience and Apple is the type of company that they rather not offer a feature its going to be a poor user experience.

I think this is one of those things its better in theory than in practice and the closest we could see from Apple would be a hypervisor to run MacOS in virtualizatoin or maybe in the cloud like XCode Cloud or Azure Virtual Desktop from Microsoft. I just do not see them dedicating the engineering resources on cramming to trying to update and cram MacOS into an 11" or 13" iPad when it could be used for other things.