Nope ....
The company I work for has 5 offices around the country (advertising/marketing firm) and they employ hundreds of freelancers as well as the core staff. They're pretty much a 50/50 mix of Mac and Windows PCs (mostly Dell or HP), but everyone is issued a corporate iPad.
We do use Apple Airport Extremes in the offices because they work reliably for us and have good range compared to some of the competing products on the market. They cost a little more, but especially in a shop where every other machine is a Mac, it made sense.
At home, I've used everything from Linksys routers to the built-in wireless on an AT&T U-Verse residential gateway (RG-1000 series) they supplied.
Obviously, most of us have also used these devices quite a bit on the go, at hotels, internet cafes, restaurants with free wifi, etc. So it's a sure bet we're connecting to many things other than Apple branded routers.
And you can call me an "Apple fan" if you like. Perhaps I fit that description. (I sure have better results and fewer headaches with malware/virus issues, software errors, etc. from the Macs than from the Windows PCs at work.)
But my point is that before Apple made "ac" gear a new standard, it was just an outlying technology that few were familiar with. It's not that Apple *invented* it (just like they didn't invent the portable MP3 music player when they released the first iPod, and they didn't invent the idea of a cellphone with a touch-screen when they released the first iPhone). But they did what they so often do; take a new technology and push it into the limelight, so it thrives.
I'm not at ALL surprised that Apple's "ac" wireless isn't achieving the maximum throughput potential right now. As much as anything, it seems to me Apple's interest in it was more in the "beam forming" capabilities it brought to the table, to help eliminate "dead spots" from obstacles weakening the signal. Throughput will get addressed with software updates over time, without a doubt.
It looks like your family and company (is the same thing?) both are using Apple products exclusively. So you probably have Apple routers. It would be really strange it Apple did not test their laptops with their own routers. The claim that Apple is ahead of the pack in adopting "ac" may only come from Apple fan. "ac" gear outside Apple universe was available for quite a while. As usual Apple was one of the last to adopt it. To add insult to injury, AnandTech discovered that OS/X can't actually use "ac" speeds to full potential (far from it) when transferring the files (the only operation that really matters in this context).