Did you ever stop to consider why Apple "fanbois" are? And why, for example, there aren't such people for other hardware or software manufacturers? (Microsoft has a good few, actually, and Linux certainly has some, but the numbers of fanatics for both combined are easily dwarfed by Apple. And no PC hardware company has anything like it.) Certainly many people will buy Apple just because it comes from Apple, but the point is that there was something about Apple that attracted them in the first place; hardware and software coming from a company that actually cares about good design and isn't as tonedeaf as Microsoft's attempts at it have been. There was & is actually koolaid to drink. In any case, Gruber is talking about industry conformity, not consumer conformity, which is a whole 'nother pigeon.

edit to reply to edit:

"The conformity is what makes Apple stuff work."

To a degree, yes. Or rather what makes Apple stuff "Just work." It certainly wouldn't be past Apple technologically to make OS X run on commodity standard boxes, but it wouldn't be a very good business decision. They're a hardware company.

"Running Linux or Windows on Apple hardware is hard."

No, not even a little bit. Well, Windows on PPC would be impossible (unless we're talking about maybe one version of windows NT, I think?) but that's Microsoft's thing not Apple's, in only supporting Intel. Apple's OS these days comes with a utility that makes installing Windows dead easy if you want to, and even if you don't use that it isn't any harder than installing it on any standard PC.