Both the iPod and iPhone so dramatically outclassed and outsold the existing devices in their respective categories that it seems fair to say they "created" those markets. The iPod achieved a measure of market dominance that's almost unheard of. The "MP3 player market" ceased to be something people talked about anymore, because there wasn't really a market. It was mostly just iPods. And Apple's only real competition in the smartphone market is a platform that didn't exist in the earlier market, and was specifically redesigned from the ground up before its release to copy the iPhone's most important features as closely as it could. Which is to say, the market that presently exists is a market for devices that didn't exist before Apple introduced them and which doesn't include substantial numbers of the sort of devices that previously constituted the smartphone market.

It is rare to see such a large amount of incorrect information conveyed so compactly. Kudos for your brevity, but pretty much everything here is wrong.

The Apple ][ continued to sell well even after the introduction and subsequent success of the Mac, which itself began development before the IBM PC even existed. The original Mac wasn't really a response to IBM, famous Super Bowl commercials notwithstanding, and the Apple ]['s eventual decline was more due to success of the Mac than the PC.

Also, Mac clones didn't kill the Mac market. The Mac was already in free fall when the OS licensing program began. Licensing Mac OS was an ill-conceived, last-ditch effort to rescue an already failing platform. This failure did precede a bona fide comeback--the only one, actually, in Apple's history.

Finally, neither the iPod nor the iPhone is a good example of Apple coming from behind. Their first entries in each market were both immediately successful, and the previous market leaders eventually became irrelevant. Apple entered markets in which they had never competed and completely took them over.

These statements presuppose the completely false notion that Apple has any reason at all to consider allowing their OS to run on someone else's hardware. They don't. The margins they make on their "overpriced hardware" are the envy of the industry, and OS X is the main incentive people have for paying the hardware premium. Moreover, Apple has built a brand identity around the "Mac experience" that depends in part on their retaining control over what hardware their OS has to support. Why on earth would they torpedo their current, highly-profitable business in order to sell a standalone OS for commodity hardware? Consider that Apple's market cap right now is almost half of Microsoft's, yet their OS market share is a tiny fraction of Microsoft's. Even if you adjust the numbers to discount the contribution of the iPod, Apple is clearly making a ton of money from Mac sales, regardless of overall OS market share. So, why should they be an also-ran scrounging for pocket change in Microsoft's couch cushions, when they can mint money with their current strategy?

While I am sure there are many good reasons for you to stick with what you have, as long as Apple continues to make billions doing things their way, complaints that they haven't committed suicide trying to win customers who don't want to buy their hardware seem sort of pointless.