The stylus is great in the right app(Procreate/Notion/Notability...) and holds more potential So: 1. Visionaries also have their blindspots 2. Ergo, App developers are a major part of what makes Apple great (FB etc moved away from this) 3. Apples ‘walled garden’ is the only platform with the potential to provide users a wholly unified computing experience, over any Apple device... a cut back version of Weiser’s vision perhaps.
Styluses were a product of limited technology in those specific devices. And even modern stylus implementations are lackluster IMO. I had a surface book for a while I used for note taking and I ultimately just replaced that method with recording audio and typing out highlights. Styluses are good for very specific tasks such as literally drawing on a computer or precisely manipulating 3d objects since they can be much more pleasant than a mouse for that task, but for general interactions? No way, styluses are awful. And they can be lost/broken.
So I don't see how this was a blindspot for Jobs. He clearly wanted to create stuff that was the computer equivalent of high fashion with mass appeal, not niche hardware.