I hear your point, but I feel like the comparison is not fair to Ubuntu. Like I said, Apple develops their own software for their own hardware. They control the whole thing. One can HOPE that everything will work out of the box. Ubuntu on the other hand has a MUCH harder task at hand depending on the computer and it's a known fact that common hardware has better support (Intel chipsets in general for example). The libre community is also spreading itself thinner by having to support every other architectures and hardware under the sun with little funding.
So my point was that given the extremely favorable conditions Apple is benefiting from (their own hardware, extremely forgiving users, bajillions of cash, advertising), they're not delivering the goods anymore.
I don't know that I buy the varied hardware thing much anymore. I mean, it's either AMD or Intel, a few chipsets, very few integrated video and it's well defined.
Support for dedicated video can be spotty I suppose, but most macs don't even have that so I'd just ignore it.
As far as controlling the hardware, it sounds like a good point, but I'd be surprised if Apple had less than 100 different variations on their laptop/desktop models over the last 5 years.
So my point was that given the extremely favorable conditions Apple is benefiting from (their own hardware, extremely forgiving users, bajillions of cash, advertising), they're not delivering the goods anymore.