First, all you need to do is get a developer's kit for iOS; most of the major corporations I know who are supporting the iPhone/iPad have it and have created their own in-house apps which can be loaded onto any in-house device as necessary. It's not jailbreaking and it's definitely supported by Apple.

The difference I'm speaking of between touch UI and desktop form factors is a physical one, not software or technology in general. The typical desktop form factor gives you a vertical display usually between 2 and 3 feet away from your eyes and sometimes farther away. In my own case, my displays are 42"--3.5feet--away. Naturally this means you have to lift your hands from the keyboard and lean forward to touch the display; logically this becomes very uncomfortable and anti-productive very quickly.
On the other hand, Apple and others have submitted patents or flat-out released transforming display stands that lower the display from its vertical position to a near-horizontal one significantly closer to the user. The idea here is to let your display become the I/O device as well as the display when needing to work in a graphical environment while still letting you work upright when working with text-heavy documents. This display layout thus makes it much easier to use the display at the level and angle of a typical typewriter's keyboard and become more, not less, productive.

Windows 8 with Metro UI is trying to be the intermediate step between keyboard/mouse & touch UI. It offers the ability to use both somewhat interchangeably but also strives to push for more touch-based development for workstation-level PCs. This lack of push for touch is why PC tablets have failed to take off for the last 10 years and the encouragement of touch may be where Surface (both pro and RT) migrates the user from the old to the new.

I'm not saying that Apple is doing it better, but Apple does have the advantage of having a viable touch UI on consumer devices now for five years while slowly bringing at least the look of the touch UI to the desktop. Apple's Mountain Lion OS is obviously aimed towards making the OS more 'touchable' and may even have Apple introducing touch-based PCs in the very near future. It's funny that HP and others have been trying to drive users into using Windows' touch UI for just about as long but Apple may actually succeed in migrating users to touch at the desktop sooner. We'll just have to see.