While it is true, it is really not that big of a deal for most schools - horses for courses and all that stuff.
It seems they were willing to pay several $hundred more for iPads. The 11" air costs $899 these days.
School districts usually have limited budgets - one suspects that when they found out that cheap Chromebooks with their integrated cloud support are actually better for their use than iPads - the idea of spending around 3 times per device for MacBooks that run the same software for the built-in cloud support or have to use native apps that might be technically more feature packed but are not necessarily as good when it comes to cloud support (unless you shell extra for something like Office 365) - they did not care much. I have a kid in middle school and one in elementary school - and I have seen what they do with their computer in school (the middle school has Chromebooks, the elementary has the rugged Thinkpad 130e running Windows) - they really do not need iPads, nor do they really need Word / Pages over google Docs. Honestly, it is easier to manage the Chromebooks as well, so the kids can not install Minecraft on it - which is, honestly, a blessing for schools.
I don't think they have limited budgets as you say. In fact, here in California, the schools have really big capital budgets that they can't spend on useful things like teachers or art programs. So large that the state comes along and takes the unspent money away to spend on whatever else. I think you limit what your child is capable of doing by limiting what his machine can do. Like maybe your child could become an adept digital artist if he had the ability to install photoshop on the machine. Plus the things aren't that good for cheap and require internet connection to work.