In another thread, you implied that you view Steve Jobs as such a visionary that the company would be in serious trouble without him. What, exactly, would Apple be losing? Not a hardware guy.
Hardware is Apple's business, but that doesn't mean Steve isn't an essential part of Apple's success, even though he's not really a nuts and bolts hardware guy in the sense of being a circuit board designer or a chip fabber or something.
His job at Apple, it seems to me, is bringing an almost monomaniacal focus on a certain design aesthetic to the table. He has very specific ideas about the way the hardware ought to look and ought to work, and judging from Apple's success, rather a lot of folks agree with him.
Programmers and compute designers tend, at the end of the day, to such--absolutely suck--at the aesthetics of design. When you let pogrammers and computer geeks do all the software, you get the user interface of Linux; when you let industrial designers and circuit board designers design your hardware, you get the hideous, overdesigned monstrosities of the Asus gaming laptops or the cheap, utilitarian, Stalinesque pragmatism of Dell systems.
Detractors of Apple like to say there's nothing that Apple does that hasn't been done before, and they're right. What they miss is that aesthetics and user experience matter.
Full-fledged operating systems on a cell phone have been done before. What Apple got right that Microsoft got wrong is that desktop systems and cell phones need different user interfaces; the Windows cell phones that have a "Start" menu and a Desktop are an embarrassment. The interface design simply isn't appropriate--something that it took the iPhone to make Microsoft realize.
Linux has had an "app store" of sorts for years; most major desktop Linux distros have long come with a program you can run to access lists of software stored in a repository and automatically (well, more or less, depending on various dependencies and versioning problems--I've never gotten WINE to automatically install correctly on Ubuntu without a lot of headache and hassle) install them on your computer. What they miss, and what Linux programmers always miss, is that presenting a window with a big long scrolling list of software packages in it isn't really a very good interface for an application repository.
Steve Jobs is neither a hardware designer nor a programmer; you won't see him with a soldering iron in his hand or punching code in Xcode. What he's good at, and where his value to Apple is, is that he can look at something and say "This is profoundly stupid design. Putting a Start menu on the screen that pops up a list of programs might be appropriate for a desktop computer, but it's totally wrongheaded for a cell phone. For a cell phone, a sideways-scrolling field of application icons is more usable." And he does that with a ferocity that's barely short of psychotic.
