Comment by stetrain

There have also been iPads running on M series chips for years now.

The actual hardware system differences between an M4 iPad Air and M4 MacBook Air are pretty slim as far as the OS would be concerned.

You can connect an iPad to an external display, keyboard, and mouse. It even has multi-window support.

Not supporting Mac apps on iPad OS is a product decision by Apple, not a hardware or underlying OS issue.