The pitch correction stuff is cool - I dreamed of that sort of stuff a while ago, but never made any attempt to try to work out how it'd work. I wonder how it works with voices and the like, as opposed to string instruments.
It's not like the iOS Phone app icon, which depicts the outline of a style of phone handset many people below a certain age have never seen or laid hands on.
Sequencers (Logic Pro, Cubase, etc) were originally built to work along side classic studio hardware. And while more and more studios these days go all software, the sequencer paradigm has stuck because it largely works. You're also right that many soft-synths / virtual instruments are there to emulate real hardware, but there's also plugins like tone generators which are quite a departure from the classic studio paradigm.
Aside sequencers, you can get other types of DAWs like trackers which, trigger digital audio projects like one would with a sequencer; except trackers have a completely digital approach (watching a tracker play is more akin to watching a hex dump scroll down a terminal emulator than watching waveforms scroll horizontally across a sequencer). Then there's DAWs based around programming which are as far removed from skeuomorphism as you can get. But those are very much a niche product.
Also let's not forget that the old studios wouldn't have had anything akin to modern audio editors (Soundforge, Audacity, etc). That's a very modern concept. However because we have adopted the old play/stop symbols that have existed on audio hardware for decades, and because oscilloscopes have made us very aware of waveforms, audio editors often look skeuomorphic even when they're really not (or perhaps it makes more sense to say that they are skeuomorphic, but not out of design - out of necessity due to sound being a wave).
If you look at something like a 303 which was originally designed to be a bass guitar support for guitarists, and ended up being the sound of Acid House; you'd be less likely to produce that method of programming if it were set up like a standard synth.
When setting up really complex sounds and devices, I can't imagine any other approach. How do you represent a device that contains, say, 10 sub-devices? Ableton makes it super clear to setup and inspect.
Unfortunately, it seems like few other companies agree with this approach and spend lots of effort drawing backgrounds and rendering knobs and switches.
I think it's a hold over from the days when to experiment with sounds, you actually did have to go plugging various cables in and playing with knobs.
Both are very good at only somewhat related tasks. But fanboyism always sucks.
No, only the iOS team did. And bets are still up to whether it was a good decision or a catastrophe for the iOS platform.
Normal users really don't prioritize the faux leather vs flat issue that much - for them features count more.