In terms of processing power the iPads are really starting to catch up to the MacBooks and this is becoming less of a barrier. It will only improve over time.
I know Touchdesigner is going through a Vulkan compatibility layer for all of their GPU instructions for cross-platform/code-portability reasons. But every translation layer you go through slows things down a little. Many other apps go through a game engine which is even slower. So this might be an issue for performance.
Chromatose uses Apple’s native Metal APIs in order to be as performant as possible. I believe this is why I’m able to get the performance we see today. And many more optimizations are still pending.
I think the bigger issues is that they’d have to completely rebuild their UI for iPad. I’d guess this would take a very long time or be enough of a hurdle to not bother. Just building the UI for Chromatose was more than 50% of the work I’d say.