EDIT: And look at Tim's wikipedia page, there's a quote: "You kind of want to manage it like you're in the dairy business. If it gets past its freshness date, you have a problem"
The sad thing is that creative vision is one of those things that all of us start out with, but then it gets beat out of us through the course of childhood and mandatory education.
What made Steve Jobs different was that he was a product guy and an incredible visionary to boot. He had the rare ability to care about details of individual products while also having a solid grasp of the big picture in terms of how those products should come together to form an ecosystem. I think Tim Cook tries to delegate those things to people who just aren't as good as Steve Jobs (naturally), which explains the questionable decisions Apple has made recently regarding their products.
I don't know if you have ever hang around supply-chain people, but with the ones I know, I would not want them designing stuff.
You make it sound as if he single-handedly sold over a billion phones. What else helped sell over a billion iPhones? Saccharine, simplified, cheery, brain-dead UI; an army of Apple loyalists, explainers, and apologists (still mourning the loss of their Beloved Leader); several metric fuck-tons of marketing and advertising spend, a panoply of factors that result in a once-per-year or once-per-every-other-year purchase cycle, and a phalanx of impeccably-decorated retail locations, among other things. Sure, Mr. Cook plays his role, and Apple's SCM is best-in-the-world, but I think there are more Tim Cooks out there than Steve Jobs.
Not product freshness.