Actually the point I'm making was more directed at the article in question, not innovation at Apple in general. In that I don't think maintaining the exclusive relationship between hardware and software has been necessary for innovation. If it was there wouldn't be a need to specifically ban non-Apple PCs from running OSX. Expanding the point to the mobile market seemed dodgy when you consider the number of manufacturers that have their own OS. Game console manufacturers have also controlled the hardware and OS in their markets. I don't think it's nearly as unique as this article tries to make it.
Their value they offer is the UI software but they're determined to get their money from marking up hardware. Presumably they have figured out people are more willing to pay the same premium when it's a smaller portion of the total price (even when it means they have to replace an entire computer to do it). In the same vein, they charged cloners too little to cover the development costs of MacOS, which is why losing desktop hardware market share to the cloners (who were more efficient hardware producers) almost killed them instead of freeing them from the 10% ghetto.
