When I heard that Apple was competing with Surface Pro I went looking for the only feature of the Surface Pro that I wanted in Apple's new tablet: side loading. 

It looks like Apple has dropped the $99 a year for not even necessarily selling anything on the App Store requirement. It's not exactly side-loading, because end users would still have to build the VM from C sources in Xcode before installing it, but it's something. 

The upshot is, since we can't ship via app-store, we can do a source distribution and get around the stupid App Store rules that hate us so. Thus, we don't have to rely on weird flaky crap like jailbreaks or have a guy paying for a dev account out of the goodness of his heart to distribute test keys for the system to those brave enough to run it without a proper touch interface. 

I may buy another iPad yet. 

Guessing most people familiar with the sitch are probably up to date, but for anyone who missed this detail, Casey to the rescue. 

http://9to5mac.com/2015/06/10/xcode-7-allows-anyone-to-download-build-and-sideload-ios-apps-for-free/