Most 'geeks' give horrendous advice to non-technical people when it comes to computers/smartphones/etc.
I was guilty of it for many years. You get so entrenched in the technical and philosophical underpinnings of something that you end up lacking basic understanding of the end user's problem.
The fact is that when you take someone who has very little technical understanding, and _no desire_ to _ever_ have a technical understanding of a computer, and put them in front of a Mac or an iPad or an iPhone, they are generally actually able to use the damn thing with very little hand holding.
As someone who has been one of those geeks, every time I see another tech head recommending Linux for their granny, I believe that a small kitten dies somewhere.
> We've come as far as we have because of open protocols and competition and Apple seems to be afraid to compete on a level playing field.
What important protocols and standards do you believe that Apple is shying away from? They made a decision in 1997 to drop all of their proprietary networking standards and put their weight onto TCP/IP. They've adopted standards in every field in which there is an obvious need. They contribute well back to the community for products that aren't a core business driver: clang, LLVM, WebKit, back ports to FreeBSD, etc.
One messaging app and one video chatting app being closed because they are profit drivers does not make the company evil, despite what Stallman and co would have us think.
If Apple were pushing their own standards for web content (and not HTML (incidentally they've been on the W3C for a long time now)), or their own standards for email, networking stacks, etc., then you might have an argument, but otherwise it seems to me that you're looking for an excuse.