I don't think they were making any kind of claim about Apple's "special sauce", only that Apple has a monopoly on high-end hardware, which is true.
- Apple has built a world wide empire selling these products in this way people seem to like
- As a result Apple has funneled that money and made world class hardware that's better than everyone else and leads in security/privacy
- Therefore we should force them to break their model because the others that didn't follow suit have hardware that sucks
That's not the most charitable interpretation, but there's some truth to it.
There’s some extra irony that the others in this case fuck over their users by leveraging their data to target ads.