A thorough review, well worth your time.

From the conclusions:

The design of the 9.7” iPad Pro is great. When looking at how tablets balance their choice of materials against their mass, thickness, and size, there’s still not really any competition for the iPad. At its core, the 9.7” iPad Pro retains the design of the iPad Air 2, but Apple has brought over the changes from the larger model like the four-speaker audio solution.

And:

The cellular model also adopts a new antenna design, which ditches the old plastic inserts for injected plastic lines much like the iPhone 6 and 6s. I think this is a huge improvement, as the color matching on the plastic inserts was poor to say the least, and they were never aligned quite right with the rest of the chassis.

And:

As far as performance goes, A9X is still the fastest chip that you’ll find in an ARM tablet, even if this isn’t exactly the same A9X that we saw in the larger iPad Pro. On the CPU side, we’re looking at the exact same performance that the larger model offers, which is pretty significant when you consider the $200 price gap between the two. There will obviously be different throttling characteristics due to this smaller iPad having less area to dissipate heat, but in general you can expect the same performance in CPU-bound tasks from both versions of the iPad Pro. As for GPU performance, it’s not as high as the 12.9″ model, but it’s the best you’ll get in a tablet of this size.

If you are balancing the 9.7″ and 12.9″ models, considering a purchase, this might be the most important paragraph:

Apple’s history with iOS products make me fairly confident that it will run into RAM issues long before A9X’s CPU and GPU or the SSD become the bottleneck. Because of that I don’t think the smaller iPad Pro is something that a consumer or a business can invest in and expect to use for four or five years, while the larger model with 4GB of RAM will still run well after all that time. At this point I don’t think there’s any place for 2GB of RAM in a tablet that markets itself as being for professionals, and in that sense I think the 9.7” iPad Pro is more like a successor to the Air 2 than a long-term usable device like the 12.9” model.

As always, great analysis.