For the uninformed like myself, why is this not feasible with the amount of cash they have? Could Apple not acquire a global carrier and mount a hostile takeover of the market?

A lot of people believe that this is the route that Google will eventually go down as they've had a tougher time with carrier support than Apple. From the outside it seems logical to eliminate a market should it pose opposition and if money and logistics were no issue I would think that it'd be an issue of when, rather than if.

how many percent of customers would the other carriers lose if apple made the iphones/ipads apple-carrier-only?