What an epic thread...
Let me add another not-making-a-smallest-difference reply to original post.

Foreword: I'm sleepy and there are going to be errors (English is not my native language). Please point them for me in PM.
Yet there is gonna be the pangalactic wisdom.

Maybe those who are bashing (great shell, BTW) are trying to explain that more effective way is not to restrict, but to cooperate. Though this reaches full effectiveness only in certain situations. This is the better part of them. And greater, I believe. Anyway, who knows.

Many had seen it as clinching proof that the whole of known creation had finally gone bananas. (THGTTG by Douglas Adams)
That's what they (and me too) are trying to get rid of: deifying one thing which particular person uses and defying any other.
We are bashing Nokia for Maemo5 incompleteness (for leaving it without normal fully-functional Ovi Maps, to mention just one point), too. Bashing quite loudly I'd say. Still, apple fans are the most fanatic fans I've ever seen, failing to see the greatness of other things and not taking into account that there is no such thing as generally "the best" without "the best for", "the best by this particular parameter" (and one parameter is very often cancels the ability to make any use of some opposite parameter). It's an interesting sarcastic joke by the apple BTW: call on thinking "different" and banning thinking different. Like, "We promised you difference and now half of the world uses our own closed standards. Owned, LOL!".
Opera has to exist beside safari.
(what a weird text if you read words without knowing software names, lol).
And Firefox has to, even more (and chromium — note by rokssolana, friend of mine).

Is it low-fat?) 'Cuz I'm worried.
IMHO, music should be art, not product. And B.M. Sharp is my hero at the moment.
Is there any competition with lowering prices on apps(t)ore or itunes? It's not rhetorical question, I'm not an apple user and I really don't know. And what about the lowering commission payments to apple?

Instead of doors, uh-huh. BTW, how exactly are those square things called in Mac? Or are they not square but different?
There is plenty of other OSes. Neither microsoft nor apple were not even the first to make windowed interface AFAIN, they only made so much marketing about it.
Greatest innovations are made by people for themselves at first, and not by the corporations, I believe. And they become progress if they are available for anyone without restrictions. (I assume that almost any Maemo app can be executed in SDK, isn't it?)

there was touchscreen phones before iphone. There was touchbooks before ipad. And with USB ports.

and there would be no angryholywars.

I don't hate apple/iphone, I just can't stand fanatics.
Apple is just another corporation that will do more and more to their own good, but not for good of users as long as the users keep deifying them.

P.S. Apple products are not bad, they are just not best for all users as they very actively claim to be. And only that last thing mentioned annoys the hell out of me. As almost any other commercial advertisement/marketing, honestly speaking. Including Nokia ones.