Apple are masters of quality of execution. That's what matters in making a device as successful as the iPhone and iPad, not whether you personally invented a particular component.
Ferrari didn't invent the car...
I don't see customers blaming Lamborghini (a tractor manufacturer) for getting in Ferrari's turf. Neither of them invented the car, so why should anyone have any opinion?
I also couldn't see Ferrari entering the tractor manufacturing business, but if it did happen it would have happened only because tractor manufacturing was a very lucrative market, picking a fight with Lamborghini being only about marketing.
Also what really matters is ... why the fuck do people waist time on such arguments and why am I not working instead of arguing with you?
Marketing is used to increase the visibility of a product or to hide its flaws.
In this particular case the elephant in the room is that Apple built something that looks and smells like a platform, but it's just a tightly controlled product line, probably with the intention of earning a monopoly on smartphones (both on hardware and on software).
And what better way to do it than ... getting people's attention on a holy war to purge the world of evil-doers like Google and Adobe, both of which have the capacity to reduce the iOS to a mere platform that can be replaced / be subject to anti-trust laws.
You're defining marketing to include the definition of the word 'ban'. It's rather silly IMO.
Apple's actions taken against evil/incompetent Google/Adobe is just a marketing ploy meant to distract critics from its real problems and to increase its loyal following ... it's been done before by others, successfully even.
In contrast Google is quite transparent in their marketing scheme ... they want world domination/monopoly of their cash-cows, and being the forward-looking people that they are, they are eliminating/preventing intermediaries from coming between them and their customers.
THE BIG QUESTION when it comes to us (outside developers or customers) is "WHAT's IN IT FOR ME?".
Who do you benefit most? In my case it's Google as they are more open and willing to crack old monopolies that also get in my way (as a dev).
Other talks about who is right, who provoked whom, or how awesome or right Jobs or Larry or Sergey are (or how they shoot thunderbolts up their arse) ... are simply irrelevant, and the fact that I have to read such stupid articles (unfortunately I feel compelled for some reason) ... keeps me from learning new things or from working.
And it's not like I can avoid it ... these kind of articles are taking over as they provoke passionate (and silly) discussions (yes, marketers know that).
I don't buy it. It's a nice idea (well, not really) but I don't believe for a second that Apple is doing it for the publicity rather than the raw ad market share.
Well, Apple quite successfully introduced an app store that didn't require carrier approval for everything. You wouldn't have been able to get past that in the first place. Or did Google announce something like that in Android first? I can't remember now, but I doubt it.