Actually, back in the 90's, when PC margins were
much higher, there were a plethora of small boutique PC builders out there. Many of them were far nicer than the Apple stores of today. Since they could turn a profit in the kilobucks on a good sale they tended to go to greater lengths to woo customers.
Nice decor, not cold-looking ikea cast-offs. Free coffee and snacks. Aeron chairs in front of high-end demo rigs loaded with the latest software, whether it was AutoCAD or Half Life. The salespeople at these places tended to be genuine computer geeks who would enthusiastically gush about anything you asked them rather than bored kids who you can see going through the Apple protocol binder in their heads after every question you ask them. Most systems coming out of places like this were custom, right down to the installed applications.
Of course, PC margins gradually shrank until they basically became commodity items. Assembling PC's gradually got easier too. e.g. When was the last time you had to set IRQ/DMA channels via dip switches or had to worry about which side of that ribbon cable goes to pin 0? Assembling a PC today is practically impossible to mess up, so a lot more people do it themselves. As nice as many of these boutiques were and despite the care that many of them put into their work, their business model simply became unsustainable. Note that Apple's computers were also sold in some boutique stores at one point, although in the 90's stores specializing in Apple products were already not doing well because Apple of the 90's was decidedly unsexy. (The stores of the 90's specializing in Apple products that I can remember were all decidedly dingy actually...)
Please do not say that Apple "changed the way" computers are sold in person. They didn't. They leveraged their higher profit-margins to build stores similar to those that their own hardware had been sold in barely a decade earlier. This let them cut out retailers, increase vertical integration, and maximize profits. There is nothing new about Apple stores except scale and profitability in an era of commodity pricing. Don't get me wrong, that's admirable, but from a business stand-point, not from a user-experience stand-point.