I have a 30-year-old amplifier that still works just fine, despite having been built before CD players and MP3 players came along. Sure you could buy an all-in-one device that integrated the amp and the tape deck, but a lot of people avoided those because they wanted flexibility, expandability, and robustness.
Similarly, back in those days it was quite common to see little TVs with an integrated VHS player. But if you were the sort of person who bought individual audio components, you probably also avoided those things, because you recognized that the function of projecting a moving image on a screen was independent of the function of reading a signal from a strip of magnetized tape, and so keeping them in two separate devices bought you flexibility, expandability, and robustness.
Now, apparently, those old lessons are still useful. I'm not very much into TVs, so I don't know, but to me the real "ecosystem" problem here is that the TV apparently is not just a display device. It's pulling double duty as a web browser also (and who knows what else is in there). Unfortunately, a year and a half is a long time in terms of web technologies, so a perfectly good device for projecting moving images onto a screen is now deemed obsolete.