I think you are correct. Most of the other replies seem to think that what Apple would do is like EC2 on up, but what you are saying is “would do something different”, so not EC2.

In a sense they have started to do this in small steps… iCloud Sync, and the new cloud-based service built into Xcode.

I think we would see Apple do more things like GCP’s original vision of App Engine, focused on improving the delivery story for Xcode developers. Write swift actors that run not on the device, but in the cloud. The code could be shipped as part of your app and run in the context of the device user. Or they could offer a shared compute that is, again, integrated into your App Store submission somehow, or maybe is a separate submission, but tied into your Xcode project.

I don’t see them offering a generic hosted VM solution. As you said, it’s too commodity and not worth iterating on for Apple.