I got the same impression, although just from a few scenes. It's impressively bad that the Newton was a "clone" of General Magic yet it shipped years earlier.
A brief use of Magic Cap and Newton OS reveals in my opinion very little in common in the shipped products.
Magic Cap was more like Microsoft Bob than it was like the Newton.
You would select an object in a picture of a room to launch applications. You would navigate from room to room to find other groups of applications.
That's not pejorative. It's descriptive.