I know. On paper, the cMBP displays sound very unappealing: low resolution relative to screen size, TN -- but they're actually pretty nice vibrant displays. OP, back in 2010, MacBook screens were the cream of the crop. Most PC notebooks had washed up displays by comparison. So, don't think Apple was off their rocker for commanding as much as they did for their notebooks.
True.
Not all TN panels are alike, and generally the MacBook Pro displays were quite good. For example, you could fairly easily tell from far away, if someone was using an aluminium MacBook, or a MacBook Pro: the viewing angles were much wider on the Pro, and colour details were more realistic.
It's also really easy to forget, that the overall quality of laptop displays has improved quite a lot in a couple of years. Earlier you had to pay huge premiums for IPS panels, and they were pretty much only available for high-end workstation laptops anyway.
Or, if they were available in consumer laptops, they were awful. Sony had some models, that were notorious for their uneven and yellow displays. The issues with current rMBP panels are nothing compared to those. IPS panels tend to exhibit some uniformity issues, which might be one of the reasons Apple avoided IPS panels until 2012. Despite their issues, the rMBP panels are actually quite good for laptop IPS panels
The resolutions have increased only very recently, in 2012 there was nothing like the rMBP display generally available. Some workstations had 15" 1920x1200 IPS panels, but that was pretty much it. Now every large manufacturer has a hi-res IPS option in consumer laptops too.
I thought the iMac used IPS before that.
The 20" iMac G5 was the first one, I believe, and all the early plastic Intel iMacs had IPS panels too. But portables were all TN up until 2012.