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Arbitrary is doing a lot of work. With MacOS you can use an iPad as a touchscreen external monitor. Try it and you’ll learn that it’s not a touchscreen OS. It’s not as simple as “not letting you”.
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Maybe it doesn't have a touchscreen interface, but i take issue with it being a touchscreen OS. I suspect most people who would want to run MacOS on an ipad would attach the appropriate user interface devices.
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Like a keyboard and trackpad, yes, and the battery would be in the base, and…
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or...plug into usb and use the ipad battery. the ipad already has a battery. Just don't limit what software you could load, that's all that's being asked here.
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uhuh except ipad keyboards with trackpads are an existing accessory
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They could have a lean version of the macOS desktop on every iPhone where it would switch to the macOS desktop once you plug it into a display. Include iWork on both sides with shared storage and you could switch between the phone interface and macOS.

I mean Samsung DeX has done something similar, but Apple could make a much more powerful version, since they have a real fully-developed desktop and they have apps for both platforms that use a single code base.

They will, of course, never do this, because it would result in losing Mac sales. Though I think less than one would initially think, because a laptop is much handier on the go than carrying a separate display, keyboard, and mouse and the lapdocks or whatever they are called have much worse displays and keyboards.

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I have long wished for a future when I could just plug my phone into a KVM and have a full desktop experience.
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Samsung DEX isn't far off from this, it's just that you're limited to Android instead of Linux, MacOS etc.

But Apple will surely never allow such a thing since their main interest is in selling as many pieces of hardware to each of the Apple Faithful as possible. So they with a straight face suggest that a single human needs an iPad Pro (which easily tops $1500 with the eye-wateringly-expensive keyboard and a storage upgrade) and a laptop. Nevermind that they may have the same chip inside.

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I own too many Apple devices, so I may unintentionally qualify as one of those Apple Faithful, but even so I can't really find a place for the iPad in my life. I've tried, I do own an old iPad Pro, but it is semi-permanently mounted to my treadmill as the only use case I've ever had that sticks. As a practical matter I either want my phone, or a real desktop computer.

Something like that Samsung DEX with a real Linux OS and maybe I'm getting a new phone.

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>"Samsung DEX isn't far off from this"

I have the latest and greatest and can attest that the experience is atrocious

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Microsoft tried to sell it as a promise of Windows Phone 10. It mostly worked just around the time that Microsoft killed Windows Phone.
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I do that with my Pinephone (a powered USB-C hub with ethernet, HDMI, keyboard and mouse; I also plug a proper set of speakers+subwoofer into headphone jack).

Both Phosh and PlasmaMobile turn into a "proper" desktop when "docked" (Gnome-like and KDE-like, respectively).

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I don't want the phone os on a screen but the phone is powerful enough to run a full linux VM and work well-enough as a good desktop.
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