I never heard the Apple folks say they invented the market or discovered nuclear fission or the cure for polio. That's just perception. They come out with a cooler product that what's out there, people (including the press, who of course have been plied with free merch) love it and away we go. Meanwhile there is a fringe group of people, mostly geeks, sitting in their batcaves grumbling about the superiority of whatever it is that they use. Yawn.
As far as "lucky," well I'm not so sure it was luck. You don't think they had the 'pod in the works for a while? You don't think they did studies and such to decide when to launch? I can't believe they spent huge amounts of time and money designing the 1G iPod then crossed their fingers and wished hard. Sure no one expected the nuclear explosion that happened but they have to had sensed a market upturn coming. You seem to completely forget the Napster Factor. The 'pod was launched at the height of The Golden Age OF Napster (RIP) and touted as the perfect device for the age of digital music. Genius. And it was certainly cooler than the clunky devices Creative and Rio had out at the time, plus the HDD storage far outstripped the 256MB flash players that were standard at the time. Luck? Nope.
As far as "it's design makes it crap." Well, nope. Nano screen scratches a design flaw? Only partly. They had a bad run of screens and the Nano design called for a thinner layer of coating than previous 'pods. Didn't work out. Oh well. Read the ARS Technica article where they dropped, kicked, ran over, hit with a hammer, and basically tortured a Nano and it wouldn't stop playing music? There's a design flaw I like: Will not stop working even if run over by a car. My Rio Carbon was my all-time fave until a true design flaw killed it: The volume wheel was poorly reinforced and would break and could not be fixed. THAT is bad engineering my friend.
Sure *ix has many superior elements but are you gonna set granny in Hoboken up with NetBSD? Didn't think so. I mean quit beating around the bush and name the perfect OS. Does it exist? Nope. I mean as far as servers go you have a point but as an all-around all-purpose OS FOR THE MASSES any *ix or Linux (remember GNU's Not Unix!) doesn't stand up. Granny needs 100% point-and-click usability and plug-n-play compatibility. Certainly no "read the man pages" and "edit the config file" stuff. That's fine for us but not for Granny.
So anyway I'm going to go monitor our Linux servers from my Powerbook and later I'll play Doom3 on my Wintel machine at home. Ahh, so glad I can enjoy the best of all worlds without reservation.
