FB is also an easy target at the moment, so Apple can use them to sell the "privacy" of their product.
That and I think Tim Apple has a bone or two to pick with Zucks.
That is simply, objectively, untrue.
There are so many falsities with your statement I don't know where to begin.
Lets start with money transfer. I often use applepay right in iMessage to split bills between parties right at the table. I iMessage them the bill and their portion, and right there through iMessage they reimburse me through apple-pay, right to my bank.
During the last major Hurricane in FL, iMessages would send while SMS and all TEXTING would not. Cellular services were down. Texting was down, but iMessage worked just fine with a WiFi connection.
My interactions on iMessage are saved to iCloud. Prior to switching to Apple devices, in 2016, my work phone was damaged beyond repair at a construction site. All of my texts were saved on device, and not recoverable. This does not and cannot occur on iMessage saved to iCloud.
This is all just off the top of my head, and these are features that are desirable and utilized in iMessage, and not available through sms.
Objectively speaking, your statement about iMessage is just plain wrong.
As anyone who has ever switched from an iPhone to an Android device will tell you, iMessage makes the process extremely painful, and in totally unexpected ways. You get your new Android phone set up, and suddenly find that you're not getting messages from any of your friends that have iPhones... because those messages are being routed over iMessage instead of SMS.
So you do a bunch of Googling or contact support for your phone manufacturer or wireless carrier, who directs you to an Apple tool for de-registering your number from iMessage. You go through that process, but it takes days/weeks for your de-registration to finally make it through "the system" to everybody's iPhones so that messaging with your friends on iPhones finally starts working again.
Did Apple do this intentionally? No, probably not. Could they solve this problem? You bet they could. But why solve something that makes switching to Android a nightmare?
https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/9/22375128/apple-imessage-an...
Yes iMessage can be decrypted by the Chinese government. But China is a much different arena than the rest of the world, it is an almost totalitarian state by default.
And it's not like Chinese government "can decrypt". Its not encryption if you share the key in plaintext. All imessages in china are scanned by the government.