Anyone ever play "Dope Hunter"? Actually I forgot what it was called exactly, but it was like a Legend of the Red Dragon type game, except you were a drug dealer, and it worked on TI-81s.
I agree with the OP that iPads currently restrict most users to being consumers, rather than programmers...but I'll admit, I didn't know many people who finagled around with creating or modifying TI programs...we mostly just distributed programs, downloaded from the Internet (or BBSes) among ourselves. However, the interface of a calculator was (understandably) pretty painful, so I think some of the more industrious of us did hack our own routines for common calculations. Even that kind of rudimentary programming/problem-solving isn't possible from the iPad or its more popular educational apps.
I loved this game in high school. We played the Windows version in my networking class. I remember shouts of "Ahh yea, cocaine is super cheap in _____!" going across the room as we tried to outmatch each other's cash pool.
I really like Microsoft's TouchDevelop suite, a Microsoft Research project that tries to bring programming into a touch-friendly IDE. It's not insanely powerful, but then again neither is a TI calculator. I know Android has some IDEs for various languages, I haven't heard of Apple allowing for a scripting language to be both written and run on the device. I think doing that would allow for some of these fears to be mitigated.
I played similar type games on my TI-86 calc and modded them some as well when I was in high school. They were basically stock buying/selling games, only with the stocks renamed as drugs to better appeal to teens.
I agree with the OP that iPads currently restrict most users to being consumers, rather than programmers...but I'll admit, I didn't know many people who finagled around with creating or modifying TI programs...we mostly just distributed programs, downloaded from the Internet (or BBSes) among ourselves. However, the interface of a calculator was (understandably) pretty painful, so I think some of the more industrious of us did hack our own routines for common calculations. Even that kind of rudimentary programming/problem-solving isn't possible from the iPad or its more popular educational apps.