I think there is also a moral angle that disturbs Windows fans to this as well: This is validation that Apple's heavy-handed walled-garden approach can, in fact, work and even sometimes beat an open ecosystem. That's freaky.
You can certainly choose to view this as a step towards bolstering the walled garden... but my money is on Apple wanting to innovate and knowing that they can. Vertical integration does a lot for efficiency, cost, etc... as well and not just keeping people in your walled garden.
People forget: Apple has been shipping their own silicon for years. If you had stellar cpus you could make in house, wouldn’t you rather use them instead?
I was hoping for USB-C too, but I bought the 12 Pro anyway.