Yes really. The fact that other phone manufacturers support CDMA doesn't mean that they didn't spend a lot of effort to do so. The companies you mentioned are also all (other than samsung) primarily cellphone companies, which means the marginal benefit of additional CDMA sales is higher.
And your EDGE->WCDMA argument proves my point, because by adding WCDMA, they were able to expand from just a few countries to worldwide sales. Massive incremental benefit (far more than adding CDMA). My repeated argument has been that adding CDMA buys them too few new customers to be worth the hassle in supporting a far more complicated baseband (or two basebands) and a far more complicated hardware design (or two hardware designs).
As a guy who spent 10 years designing microprocessors and shipping reference designs with reference code, I can tell you Apple ain't gonna let the chipset manufacturer write their baseband code for them. And they ain't gonna hire some magic contractor who will "port" the code for them. They are going to have to write the code themselves, and, more importantly, support it themselves.
