When Steve Jobs started with NeXT in the mid 80s he got a demo of a novel program that can be used to interactively design general user interfaces - the first program of its kind.
It was written in Lisp by Jean-Marie Hullot. It was called SOS Interface, marketed also as Action! by the company Expertelligence.
Steve Jobs hired him and Jean-Marie created the Interface Builder - which became one of the most important tool on NeXT OS. Then for Mac OS X and now for iPhone OS.
This innovation is now hindered by Apple. The innovative software may not be written in Lisp anymore, but it is not necessarily Objective-C either.
With the Mac everybody got a copy of HyperCard - everybody could write and design programs in a simple way - using the built-in HyperTalk. Xerox had such a software years before - called NoteCards and written in InterLisp-D.
With the iPad, which is much more capable than the Mac where SOS Interface and HyperCard were developed, everybody is degraded to be a consumer. The goal is no longer to be a maker, a creator, a programmer. You can't even use a shell to connect to your own iPad.
There is huge domain of visual programming and end user programming to be explored on touch screen devices. Maybe Apple is working on that and hiding this (like Jobs claimed that 'nobody reads anymore' and some time later Apple now sells iBooks) - from what we see now Apple hinders innovation and innovators in these areas.
I want a 'DynaBook' and not a media player.
Steve Jobs did not really understand what he saw at Xerox PARC when he got the demos of the Smalltalk system. He got the idea of the graphical user interface. But what he overlooked was the concept of object-oriented programming. He later with NeXT understood that. But what he never really got was the importance of interactive programming, end-user programming - the role of the user being able to program his computer in a straight-forward way. The cultural importance of being able to write, understand and change software.