> doesn't feel like something anybody wants to be chasing any more
A reasonable speculation. Of course the best data will take a while to become available.
The one data point (showing in headlines this morning) is that, judging that it took only 1 hour for iP5 shipping time to move back from 1 week to 2 weeks, this phone is selling several times as fast as any iPhone predecessor.
Apparently some body is "chasing it."