The title probably says it all.

Considering an ipad's processor is nothing compared to a macbook, I would think a Macbook should be more than capable to run the simulator. However, not knowing much about iphone/ipad development, I'd like to get some opinions on this.

for e.g. how many apps are typically need to be run for ipad dev (editor, debugger, perf monitor, trace log, etc). are these apps resource (memory, cpu) intensive?

please do not take into consideration the actual image, 3d, video, sound development. I understand one would need quite a beefy machine to produce these type of creative assets. What I'm looking at is a machine to do code development, physics, putting together the produced assets (images, vector graphics, 3d video, sound, etc).