To me, this is like a automotive executive saying "the engine doesn't matter, they're all the same anyway". The engine probably doesn't directly matter to most customers and they are mostly the same. However, it's lunacy to say that the heart of your product isn't important. If the engine has problems, your customers have problems. If the OS has problems, your customers have problems too.

Yeah, developer tools and APIs are very important, but they're only as good as the platform they target.