Where I thought you were going with that when I read your first sentence is, I wish people could look at products for the things they do (features they have) rather than for the things they don't do (features they don't have). Regardless of Apple's recent slip in quality, they consistently put out features later than some of their competitors, but also at a higher quality than their competitors. Too often I'll see an article about "Apple introduces TouchID" and the comments say "Samsung has had a fingerprint reader for years!" like that matters or like the various fingerprint reader solutions were any good before TouchID. Or the iPod, we all know it's not the first MP3 player, but it was a very high quality MP3 player with a very high quality user experience, which really does matter.
I felt the same way about Palm (Google was a cooler company, so Android won even though WebOS was a more pure Linux system, friendlier to developers, and HTML/JS was the preferred app architecture followed by standard C++) and Microsoft (they don't have X app, even though the features from X app are built into the core OS). Dropbox was the same way, people hated on it when it was released because a hacked-together rsync solution worked "the same way".
Too often we get hung up on what a product doesn't do or doesn't do uniquely and ignore that execution is often more important. It's possible to launch into a crowded and competitive market and win, as long as you execute better.