So in 2010 they tell webmasters speed is now a ranking factor. A few months later they launch a paid for service for webmasters to improve speed. Cynical? Me? Possibly...

So Apple are able to write software that runs reasonably well on hardware they design and control - hurrah! I hardly see how this is in anyway comparable to what Microsoft is doing when it attempts (albeit badly with Vista as the obvious example) to write code that will run on an almost infinite variety of machines they don't have any part of the design of.