From there, AI integration is enough of a different paradigm that the existing apple ecosystem is not a meaningful advantage.
Best case Apple is among the fast copies of whoever is actually innovative, but I don't see anything interesting coming from apple or apple devs anytime soon.
The problem for other companies is not necessarily that data center-borne GPUs aren't technically better; its that the financials might never make sense, much like how the financials behind Stadia never did, or at least need Google-levels of scale to bring in advertising and ultra-enterprise revenue.
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/resident-evil-3/id1640630077
Until the first Cambridge Analytica-sized privacy story hits a major cloud LLM provider, maybe.
With "Apple Intelligence" it looks like Apple is setting themselves up (again) to be the gatekeeper for these kind of services, "allow" their users to participate and earn a revenue share for this, all while collecting data on what types of tasks are actually in high-demand, ready to in-source something whenever it makes economic sense for them...