Apple certainlly isn't afraid to get into whizing contests with sacred little empires like Flash, etc, and sometimes that translates into consumer limitations, although in almost every case either an equivalent or a work around is feasable.

One thing that I do respect them for is the quality of construction and overall ergonomics. They are second to none. Every time someone breaks out an iClone or Padwannabe, you can tell its always a slightly inferior design in several ways. You would think that with every company in the universe building every consumer good in China, they would take at least some of their massive savings from slave labor working 16 hours a day with no bathroom break, zero enviromental regulations, hardly any taxes, little if any possibility of litigation and almost no regulation of any kind and at least put some of that back into the product. Nope, most manufacturers save all that money making things in the zero overhead boiler rooms that would make the robber barons of our industrial revolution blush yet they STILL mostly make junky products.

At least Apple makes high quality works of art with a small part of their "savings" from agressively avoiding American workers. Gotta give them credit for that.