Let's face it:
"Serious Operationg Systems", i.e. systems the end user has full control over and can in principle accomplish any task with are a thing of the past, and these times won't be coming back.
30 years ago, the vast majority of computer users were geeks. Being able to understand and change the way their devices work was part of their life style, and there was pretty much no point for non-geeks in using a computer at all.
Today, these same geeks are just a small fraction of all the computer users, because today a lot of people use computers that 30 years ago didn't even know what a computer was. Ironcally some people still don't know, but today it doesn't stop them from using computers anyways because computers have become ubiquitous.

Some people say that computers have just "grown up", because they think that this state of maturity includes that the end user would not have to care about how it works. It just does.
For the manufacturer this mindset facilitates support and generates additional ROI (user data).
For the average end user it's convenient because walled gardens are comfortable and pretty as long as you accept the walls around you.
The laws of the market dictate, that the needs of the many (average users) outweigh the needs of the few (geeks).

In that regard, x86 (and probably even more so GNU/Linux/the unix aproach) is a relic of another era, that's only still around because it works well and in its niche never allowed any competitor to gain a foothold.


I've tried the desktop variant of PureOS on a laptop and it's basically just the same like Debian with Gnome.
In principle Gnome could work well on a big touch screen (10"+), but because the Gnome devs refuse to resize the desktop area when the on-screen keyboard is shown, it actually does not work. They say that resizing the desktop would irritate the user, but not resizing it means that terminal windows (or anything where the lower part of the screen is essential) become useless.
I found that Xfce with the "Onboard" [1] keyboard works much better.

On small screens I still don't understand how working without a hardware keyboard can work at all. On a 5" screen you basically need the whole screen to display a half-way useable keyboard, because unlike on a hardware keyboard where you get haptic feedback before(!) a key is pressed (e.g. N900) you can't make the individual keys on an on-screen keyboard any smaller than a fingertip.
I understand that on-screen phone keyboards basically circumvent this limitation by auto completion and auto correction and that seems to work well for texts that are adressed to humans. But I can't imagine this would work in a terminal where you type highly context-sensitive arbitrary two-letter commands.


[1] https://launchpad.net/onboard