None of those things were outside apple's core competency...
Ok that's an oxymoron if I've ever read one. There's no company that goes out of it's way to spend millions of dollars and get involved with all of the legal pain of corporate acquisition just to "Tweak" their core competencies...That would just be simply stupid.
Apple needed to buy their way into a new OS direction because they simply had not the faculties to re-develop the Mac OS into a modern OS or re-build it around UNIX or Linux.
Apple needed to buy Final Cut, eMagic Logic and a whole host of other compositing technology companies, because they had not the the faculties to develop real-time multi-stream video/audio editing or finishing products for audio or video, but they needed to get back into those markets to maintain the single marketshare/demographic that would still support the company.
Certainly Apple had some ASIC/RISC development background, but realistically they were extremely limited since they'd spun off ARM at least a decade earlier and weren't the main silicon developer in the PowerPC partnerships they were in even before the switch to Intel. What they knew about processor development was antiquated and they needed to rebuild that well from scratch prior to the PA-SEMI acquisition.
Acquiring ORACLE/CRAY would represent another acquisition the same vein of Apple's previous blueprint. However, making that level of commitment to server hardware and software development would require quite a bit of testicular fortitude. That fortitude would be particularly necessary in the middle of the Flash war that Steve Jobs started and the fact that a lot of people still view Apple as "Cultish." I don't know that Apple has much chutzpa these days being as warm and comfy as they are in their consumer market, but I hope that they sooner rather than later A.) Realize how short sited not being in the server market is and B.) Aren't naive enough to believe that they can provide every user of Apple hardware everything they'll ever need error free in perpetuity from their Oracle based cloud in South Carolina.
True, the only places where I've seen Apple servers being used is for large scale rendering farms but these days with the rise of cloud computing many animation houses are just buying time on a cloud computing platform...
Uh....no. There's no medium to large sized company that will put their non-disclosure agreement materials on a publicly accessible server system because they all know there's no online server that can't be hacked. (there's no company over twenty years old that doesn't have "disgruntled" ex-employees floating around eager to do the company in.)
U.S. media producing companies could probably cut their costs drastically and compete with places in the UK and Vancouver, but their clients won't approve processes that include cloud processing for large chunks of the projects just because of potential leaks and reliability questions. Vancouver and UK houses keep their processing in-house, but pay their employees less.
Bottom line is Apple should figure out that having some influence on the back end of these various industries ultimately is in their long term best interest as everyone inches closer to an ever more networked computer world. Productizing "Cloud" solutions for businesses instead of thinking Apple can control it all from South Carolina or wherever is a critical next step for them while they have the momentum on the client/consumer side of things.
