Yes. Those are for photos only - plugging in an SD card through one of these opens a special “app” that allows for transfer of photos, and that’s it. Nothing else. AFAIK, you can’t even transfer photos TO the SD card.
You can also use wi-fi drives. I use a little device call AirStash with mine, as I don’t need a full on 500GB drive everywhere I take my iPad or Kindle.
Apple does their best to ensure you don’t store any files on an iPad/Pod/Phone. Only what iTunes lets you put there. Apps like DropBox can ease the pain.
Basically with Apple you get used to “No, you can’t do that.” Android is “Sure, why not? But if you break it, it’s your problem.”
Printing is a tricky business on any sort of tablet. They are computers but they don’t support a wide range of hardware like desktop computers. Do some research on Printing with Android and Printing with iPad.
Tablets are basically all about apps. Sounds like a cheap netbook type thing is what you want.
But I find my ipad can do anything a notebook can do and a lot more besides. (At a premium price admittedly.)
Battery life is immense for one thing. I have a bluetooth keyboard case, a variety of very cheap apps that are office compatible and no need of usb because icloud and dropbox are fine (especially as I might need to access them on a variety of devices and dropbox synchs my files to all my devices automatically). Or cloudon gives me access to an online MS Office suite wherever there is wi-fi (I didn’t go for the 3g option as wherever I want to work there is wi-fi).
And when they are not there’s several dirt cheap apps that let me copy files to and from my pc over wi-fi even if it’s hundreds of miles away.
For printing every new printer nowadays has airplay, even the cheapest models.
Plus wherever I have access to wi-fi I have my entire music connection both via google storage and the icloud facility and where I don’t I have it over 3g on my phone. Without having to worry that I’m reducing my battery life to 90 minutes or so. And with the apple tv device airplay lets me easily play anything from my collection directly thru the hi-fi linked to the TV. Or Netflix.
I have a mac air as a base machine but the ipad is my ‘road warrior’ device of choice.