Ah ok.
So. The first thing we need to note is that there will be 2 standards in play here. There will be your standards, for how difficult or easy a given UI is to use, and there will be Apple's. I suspect your standards are not Apple's. You're probably more comfortable with a higher level of sophistication. Apple sells iPads to grandparents, so they can FaceTime with their children. Amongst many others. So in terms of readability and hit targets, and expectations, we should note this.
So looking at your link - and it's a tough comparison, since nothing there is at native rez or display PPI of course – something like this:
Does not strike me as parrticularly cluttered, pretty good, although the choice of what looks like a Serif font on the icons is not good, and the type itself is too small. IMO. The layout is quite floaty, I'm not sure of the relationship between these groups of objects, but sans more context I'll just leave that alone.
Something like this:
... does
absolutely strike me as too cluttered, and visually incoherent. It's not about how many icons you can cram into the canvas, you also have to consider how many
things or concepts people can mentally juggle at once, and a host of other things.
There are 24 icons on that screen. The rest taken up by that odd strip of - what, extra-wide desktop? Some sort of virtual space manager? Whereas an iPad home screen will hold – guess. 20 icons, in the primary area, and another 6 in the Dock, making 26. So they didn't even really gain anything in that dept. Plus, totally illegible icons in the lower left (what are those?), and the status icons in the lower right are occupying a silly place, just to be different. Lower right is a very powerful corner, you don't waste that with status icons, but is more appropriate for active controls or Next buttons or what-have-you.
That's a bit of a mini-rant on that but this is what I'd say if one of my people handed me that. (Please don't read that as an argument from authority, just context).
So in the end I suspect that this discussion basically breaks down to that distinction between your own targets and a wider mass-audience target, which is of course totally fine, but one should note the difference. At 7" that one above does strike me as problematic.