As someone with formal training and experience in video production with Final Cut Pro and Premiere...I find editing on iPad to be an utterly infuriating experience.
I gave it a sincere try, but the UX is so utterly subpar that it's simply not worth the time or effort anymore. The file management on iOS is atrocious: support by various editing apps is questionable at best, and even if it wasn't, it's incredibly slow. Waiting while importing high-res videos off SD media to the file system, then turning around to wait an equally long time for the media to get imported into your editor is extremely irritating. There's also not a lot of serious competition in terms of quality editing apps. It seems like everything other than Luma Fusion is gimped to the point of near-uselessness for anything but the most basic of cut-and-crop type workflows.
iPad did have a slight edge in terms of render performance and efficiency versus ultraportable notebooks like the MacBook Air for a brief period between the A12x-based Pro release in 2018 and the release of the M1 MacBook Air in 2020, but now that the M1 Air is on the table, it's well worth the few extra ounces to go with a M1 MBA for mobile video editing.
Editing video on the iPad is, it pains me to say, "disruptive".
I believe you when you say it's infuriating to someone with formal training, used to the professional tools. I wouldn't know, this is how I've taught myself to edit video.
It's inferior and the software is cheaper. The hardware isn't necessarily, but it sure is if you own an iPad and don't have a dedicated machine for editing video.
And the experience is steadily improving, and at some point it might well "worse is better" the specialized hardware and expensive software which is the industry standard.
Or it might not. Time alone will tell.
It's worth pointing out that the current iPad Pro also has an M1, so the choice between an MBA and an iPad Pro is much less clear along that dimension.
I generally agree with you and recognize that I'm coming at this from a somewhat niche perspective.
I think the thing that frustrates me the most is that Apple has repeatedly failed to fix the performance and usability issues related to file management that have plagued iOS/iPad OS since the feature was introduced. Fixing the poor performance + increasing versatility of the file manager (or allowing 3rd party file managers like Android) would massively improve the editing workflow on iPads, and for me, would probably push it into the 'good enough' tier of performance that might lead me to leave my MacBook at home when editing video on the road.
There's definitely some latent potential for video editing to be redefined along broader task-and-genre lines. That is, in essence, the difference between "consumer" and "pro", because a pro is burdened by having to reshape the medium in utmost detail to fit a structure that they planned, while a consumer expects a readymade media which simply "filters" their efforts through a predefined strategy.
Since video editing is no longer governed by literal machinery, it can deprofessionalize into a set of smaller consumer languages, though if you imagine all the forms of editing that exist, it's unlikely that we'll have total coverage anytime soon.
I gave it a sincere try, but the UX is so utterly subpar that it's simply not worth the time or effort anymore. The file management on iOS is atrocious: support by various editing apps is questionable at best, and even if it wasn't, it's incredibly slow. Waiting while importing high-res videos off SD media to the file system, then turning around to wait an equally long time for the media to get imported into your editor is extremely irritating. There's also not a lot of serious competition in terms of quality editing apps. It seems like everything other than Luma Fusion is gimped to the point of near-uselessness for anything but the most basic of cut-and-crop type workflows.
iPad did have a slight edge in terms of render performance and efficiency versus ultraportable notebooks like the MacBook Air for a brief period between the A12x-based Pro release in 2018 and the release of the M1 MacBook Air in 2020, but now that the M1 Air is on the table, it's well worth the few extra ounces to go with a M1 MBA for mobile video editing.