Apple's strategy is not one of creating hardware. It isn't one of creating software. It's one of creating a digital ecosystem which interoperates with almost magical fluidity.
I'd consider myself to be in the top percentile in terms of technical ability worldwide - fine, sounds like bragging, but there are precious few people on this earth who know code from machine to assembly to a few dozen high-level languages, and also know how to build large, highly redundant and highly available systems. I know others like me - and the vast majority of them use apple hardware and software for their daily computing needs.
The reason? When you're ascending, and you're in that top 5%, you're still at the point where you want to tinker with everything. You want to switch motherboards. You want to upgrade your graphics card. You want to build a custom firmware for your phone just because. Eventually, you master those skills, and you move on - you move into industry, or you move into an area of expertise in which you don't want to have to worry about whether you've got enough cooling on your overclocked GPU.
The point is - apple make some of the best tools out there. The iPhone just works. Sure, you can't run custom, unvetted code on there, but the code you can run on it does what it says on the can and does it damned well. Sure, upgrading a mac is a pain in the jacksie, but those elements which you'd reasonably want to upgrade within the lifecycle, you can, easily. As for reliability? In the organisation I run, we have a 50/50-ish split between commodity hardware (think dell) and apple machines. The overall failure rate is roughly even between the two, and given that all of the macs are laptops, I think it's a fair cop.
Summary: apple make tools. They make tools which work for everybody from total noobs to über-leets. Plenty of people don't get this. One day they will. Therefore this doesn't matter.