Well I got a Lenovo Yoga with a touchscreen and I somewhat disagree. I use the Gnome desktop. And it follows most of the design principles you’d have on other devices like Apple or Android. Sure, it’s not a 1:1 copy of Apple. And the high-dpi auto-configuration and -detection may not be there yet. So you’d need to configure it yourself. You can set the UI scaling in the settings app and all the buttons become (for example) twice the size. This works really well.

The on-screen keyboard has annoyed me to no end. But it got better and maybe most issues will be solved once we switch to Wayland and it’ll pop up at the right moment. (I advise against installing important system apps via Flatpak, this generally leads to issues and incompatibility. And it’s not Linux’s fault.)

The full disk encryption is a bit of an issue. You’d need to put the key into the TPM module and the tutorial to do it is really long. I don’t see a good solution there, aside from putting the device into standby and not rebooting it that often.)

I don’t think Gnome is clunky at all, given the on-screen keyboard pops up… Auto-rotate works, the button sizes are configurable, the stylus from Lenovo works out of the box. You have a full screen app launcher that is nice… And it’s super responsive on my device.

I agree that sometimes the experience get’s interrupted by software that isn’t adapted for touchscreens. Most of the desktop is. And some browsers are annoying and we’d be right to criticise that. But if Visual Studio Code lets you down if you start developing a Rust application… I’m not sure how that compares to an iPad, because you wouldn’t be able to do it at all on such a device. So I wouldn’t include desktop software.