BBW is right, that is indeed what we see in most cases.
As far back as the late 1700s skilled workers from England were migrating to the USA, for instance at one point wallpaper makers were forbidden by law from leaving the country.
Eastern Europe lost many skilled workers, particularly in design to western Europe and the USA when it was socialist. The Berlin wall was built explicitly to stop skilled workers leaving.
China has been bleeding skilled people for centuries bounded only by the willingness of less screwed up countries to to take them.
The fact is that in (say) 1990, the best place in the world to be almost sort of design professional was the USA, so great was the lead, that individual states all by themselves attracted more foreign designers than any country.
For a golden age from about 1900 to 2000, a combination of high living standards, human rights, a choice of climates, and a relatively low chance of being murdered by your government made the USA an obvious choice for many design workers from chips to clothes. Of course once they moved there, that made it even more attractive as a destination because of greater opportunities and creative infrastructure, which attracted more people, forming a strong virtuous circle.
That's of course why the USA is still the biggest economy in the world by a considerable margin.
Of course Obama's racist immigration policy means that many talented people can't go to the USA, and many other places have wised up to the need to attract talent on a global basis. It's hard to see Obama or a possible Republican successor seriously address that issue.
China will struggle to attract global skilled labour; pollution, absence of even a perceived need for human rights, homophobia, and corruption mean that most people would require significantly more money to work in China than (say) California. Not all America's Moslems are treated thte way they should be, but if 9/11 had happened in China, they'd all be in death camps, along with anyone who had a moslem-sounding name, or wore a turban (yes, I know turbans aren't a major item of Moslem clothing)
As BBW says, the stable equilibrium is where design and manufacture are closely coupled. Modern communications make that less true than it once was, but it is still a serious force.
Also there is a tension between being near the people who make the stuff and peoplee who buy it. If I was designing a pad to compete against Apple, I'd want my designers to have some intuition on what it is people do with digital media, and a vast area of weakness for Apple is it's low penetration into business, so I'd want my guys to understand why suits still buy Dell notebooks.
Some of the design is best done in collaboration with the manufacturing guys, Apple has mostly got over the problems it has suffered for decades that it's gear felt like it was built by 9 year olds armed with glue guns, that requires proximity to manufacture. Actually that's not a Chinese thing, Apples were built badly when the plant and design were both in California, but too decoupled by the bean counters.
So a dream design team is not in any particular place, >90% of the world's manufactured goods are not sold in the PRC, and basing design teams there runs into the problem hit by US car makers.
US cars are increasingly hard to export because Americans actually choose to buy cars that most other people see as crap, whereas Japanese people want cars that are pretty much the same as most people in the world want as well, ditto Germany.
America makes a huge % of the world's aircraft because the issues around moving people or bombing them vary little around the world.
A team of Chinese engineers, working in the PRC could easily build a perfectly decent flat screen TV with no outside help, but going back to the iPad...
I am no Apple fanboi, but even a year after it's launch, the pads I've seen are all behind by almost any criteria. Almost all are made in China, some actually manage to be more expensive and less good. Apple has never been shy of high prices for their stuff, so when they undercut your product, you've screwed up. The IPad wasn't even leading edge technology, every component in it from processor through screen was generally available, and again often made in China.
This goes back to my core point.
Apple is good at a very small number of things, but is very very good at these few.
Chinese firms have optimised themselves along the IBM model, towards being bigger and having as many fingers in as many pies as possible. When was the last time a thought about technology that in any way involved IBM crossed your mind ?
Chinese firms can't do marketing, they can barely do sales. They compete on price, and to be fair do that well, but to get serious margins they need to develop brands.
