What am I missing here?
How could an M4 be considered to be useful for the mission of an iPad but not the current Mac Studio or Mac Pro?
Maybe the top end Mac Studio and Pros aren’t selling too well. All Mac sales only account for around 10% of Apple’s total business.
Perhaps they aren’t in a hurry to upgrade models that don’t contribute much to the bottom line?
The scuttlebutt is that the M3 process was expensive and low-yielding and Apple took it on the chin to offer even the M3 Max in the laptops. The M4 is on a more reliable process and they’ll be refreshing base, Pro, Max and Ultra everywhere as soon as they can. It’s only due to weird timing that the iPad got the base chip before a laptop did.
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I agree the market for Mac Studio and Mac Pro is small (all Mac computers combined are only 8% of Apple’s business, so these two are no doubt trivial).
But the market for an M4 iPad is surely even smaller than that.
I think I read that the M3 chips had a yield problem (or something?). And the new iPad Pros needed an upgrade (for marketing purposes).
Then someone said, “Hey, we’ve got all these M4s sitting around, why not stick them in the new iPad Pro?” 
I speculate that the binned M4 chips will sell just fine in an iPad, but would have been a sore point among reviewers if they went into a MacBook, so may as well use a bunch of them as headline grabbers and revenue generators in iPads.
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And based on how new chip processes usually develop, the number of defects (and thus binned chips) will probably go down over time, making it less expensive for Apple to ship unbinned chips in future products. If fact, in a year or so we may well see a revision of the iPad Pro that offers 4 performance cores in all M4 iPad Pros, regardless of storage size. That’s basically what they did with graphics cores going from the A12X to the A12Z.
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