I agree with a lot of this, but one point seems to contradict facts:

Even if he's reduced to giving the machines away, as long as he can charge rent for access to data (or apps) he's got a business model.

Hasn't Apple repeatedly stated the case that the App Store runs at break even? The whole idea is to drive sales of machines. Now if it is for some cloud based services in the future that might work - still an iPhone unsubsidized is ~$600 so that is a good deal of cloud service revs that need to make up for that.