In the Windows case, they can enforce your inability to install/enable Hyper-V on Windows Home through simple measures like protecting system files from modification.

But in the iPadOS case, the only way to really prevent you from running a macOS VM, is by preventing you from running any VM.

Due to the Turing-completeness of virtual machines, there's really no lesser measure they can take. You literally cannot create a piece of software that can run arbitrary VMs except for if the VM is semantically macOS. Whatever signal you would look for to blacklist macOS, an adversarial VM creator can mask by modifying the installation. (At an equilibrium point of such a game, the "adversarially-created macOS VM" would end up looking more like a Hackintosh rootfs than like a Mac rootfs — but it'd still look and feel and work like macOS, and that's all users would care about.)

The one of the two with a lower profit margin for the manufacturer would usually be the one considered to have more "value" in it.

The usual way to measure this, when software editions are locked to particular hardware, is by looking at the cheapest hardware they sell that'll have the given edition of the software installed.

(Another example of this: managed vs unmanaged routers.)

> Why stop at 2 hardware editions?

You're limited by the willingness of your developer ecosystem to develop different versions of the same third-party software for all your different OSes. Nobody wants a device with no third-party app support.

(But that being said, there is actually a third, even-less-capable hardware ecosystem Apple sells, with its own ecosystem of mostly fungible apps: Apple TV!)