Previously, I had suggested (based on sources, for reasons) that Apple might wait until October to announce the iPad Pro. They, however, did not wait.
The iPad Pro, as it transpires, is a very powerful piece of hardware. In terms of computing horsepower, it completely blows every other iPad (and many other tablets in general) out of the water. The CPU is said to be over 20-times faster than the original iPad, and the GPU is said to be 360 times faster than the original iPad. For a while, Adobe was claiming it had 4 gigabytes of RAM (references to this were later removed) and there are some other niceties, such as big larger display and the new integrated keyboard stand, as well as the Apple Pencil, which is a particularly fancy stylus.
I think the iPad Pro is part of the answer to a really complicated question about productivity on the iPad, which has sort of had fits and bursts of improvements over the years.
One of the misconceptions about the iPad (and tablets at large) is that the attempt is to completely replace all existing types of computers. It wouldn't make sense for that to happen, however. Even though desktop computers are popular, workstation computers still exist. Even though "small" computers exist (in particular, anything that's a microcomputer, tablets include) and mainframes and supercomputers are still being used. Instead, I think that tablets are best thought of as another type of computer that exists as a new product to serve new types of users.
The kinds of things tablets are really good at is direct manipulation of content, reading and viewing things, and "light" tasks such as writing, e-mailing, organization and personal information management, and similar types of things. To this day, I use it both on the go and as a sideboard to my primary computers. This is something I do both with my Surface RT and my iPad 3.
The iPad Pro is an exceedingly powerful device, and its new display should enable some different interfaces and experiences. The keyboard is maligned a little bit, but this isn't the first time Apple has had a first-party physical keyboard that was expressly for the iPad, and the Pencil is going to enable some different experiences, such as high precision illustration tasks.
The biggest problems that are going to remain are workflow problems (especially with really big datasets such as video files) as well as the fact that Apple is relying really heavily on third party developers to create the experiences that power these devices. Apple has been failing to really meet the third party developers and provide options such as free trials of applications, paid upgrade options (without releasing the app as a new app) and other things.
I think the question is whether or not the iPad has enough applications and whether or not there's a use case for such a device, at that particular price, with its accessories. The base iPad Pro is $799 and for that price, you're going to get a very fast device, but you'll want a cover, possibly the $169 cover, and possibly the $99 Pencil. The Surface Pro 3 is comparable in cost, and another interesting comparison are the MacBooks Pro and Air.
I think the iPad as a primary computing device is going to make a lot of sense to users who are adapted to a workflow where your data exists primarily in the cloud, and where you stream your entertainment. Even for somebody with a desktop machine at home, using streaming media and storing documents in a cloud service, there's a lot of opportunity for this as a mobile computer, or potentially as a gaming device.
The biggest problem is staying within the realm of tasks that the iPad is good at. Either you're talking about people who aren't using computers very heavily anyway being the user of this iPad, or you're talking about somebody very good at simply distinguishing what tasks are suitable for which computers.
The question for somebody who is going to pair an iPad (of any type) with a desktop-experience computer is what stuff is suitable to use, and what way are they using it. I ask myself this about the iPad from a pretty regular basis. Word documents stored on SharePoint and OneDrive, as well as my OneNote notebooks, now happily make the round-trip between my Windows computer, Mac, iPad, Windows tablet, and probably even an Android tablet, though I don't have one to test.
At this point, I see the iPad Pro as a different, high-performance device option for people who are already using the iPad as their main computer or main portable computer. The ability to run two apps side-by-side is potentially a big boon to that crowd, and depending on the exact workflow, the keyboard and pen accessories make sense. We'll have to see what third party software developers do with it.