He has a very good dev understanding, it is more about being more useful and efficient directing the company rather than writing code. Steve made most of the major design decisions in OS X, for eg. and is a lot like billg at msft

That is certainly the impression I have. I wouldn't expect him to be writing production code anymore but I do wonder if he hacks on anything personally or if any of his kids do.

I think his technical involvement with Apple started and ended in the 70's, when he helped assemble the Apple I boards that Woz designed. I don't know if he's ever coded. I found a video once of him demonstrating NextSTEP, but it stops right before he's about to demonstrate the programming environment, so I don't know if he even demoed that part or got someone who could code to do it.

What he has done personally is some of the design; he's listed on the design patents for the glass staircase at one of the main Apple stores, and personally designed one of the glass cubes.

Well, he did say that he'd read all of Knuth's books...

(See http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...)