I wrote a number of essays in high school on my iPad (the first one) using the touchscreen keyboard. I also did digital painting using the Brushes app and my finger (later with a touchscreen stylus), and made some simple music tracks using piano and looper apps. On the original iPad, with software that was basically available since launch.

Nowadays I do computer graphics for fun, and I want to be able to create full applications, so I lug around my MacBook, but I have no doubt if I upgraded from my venerable iPad 1 I could find apps that let me play with shaders, or web-apps that let me do quite a bit more.