Yes, but who other than Jobs has the authoritas to convince those engineers to make that 13mm a reality?

Perhaps there's a distinction to be made between building the individual components and building 'the product'. Obviously, Jobs doesn't do the former, certainly not by hand. But he's very much involved in product development throughout the entire design cycle: initial vision, product definition, decisions about integration with other services, constant iteration of software and hardware (this is where he's said to be very hands on, constantly using the product and giving direction), final spec/price points, packaging, and marketing. This creation of a complete product is what has made Apple so successful in the last decade and seems to me to clearly be the 'building' of a product.

Anyway, if vision and negative taste are cheap and easy, why don't more tech companies seem to have them? It doesn't at all seem to me that the trait that makes Apple stand out is that they have engineers that are head and shoulders above the rest of the industry. Not at all. Apple's engineers are good, but hardly unique in their ability to make 13mm thick tablet computers. It's that they have taste and vision and they execute on top of them.