2. Some people like the walled garden. I'm not really amongst them, but I do tolerate the walls. (For those who absolutely abhor walls, there's rootable Android devices out there that can satisfy an itch to tinker with something in compact portable electronics. That's a lot of fun, too, but it's heading in the opposite opposite direction of Just Works.)
*: They "just work" within their limitations, which can be severe. It frustrates me that I can't install real Firefox on the iPad so I can use uBlock Origin, and it frustrated me that the iPod Touch didn't even come with the ability to install apps or even copy-and-paste text out of the box**. But in both cases, the devices behaved very well with the functions they were permitted to utilize.
**: I jailbroke the iPod Touch and went pretty far off the reservation with it (adding a clipboard, installable apps, multitasking, and a useful userland) because that was fun for me at that time, but by no means did I have to do any of that -- it was a very fine touchscreen music player with 802.11 and a web browser all by itself without any of that kind of help, and that's pretty much what it was promised to be able to do. And that was a long time ago; during the gap, I'd forgotten more about IOS than I ever knew.