Here's my take: Sweeney's affectations to surprise notwithstanding, this should really be a surprise to precisely nobody. Apple stands to gain next to nothing from the new business model that Epic is attempting to engineer through "lawfare"; therefore, unless a US court plainly
directs Apple to usher Fortnite back into the US App Store, Apple will do no such thing.
My reasoning: The screenshots indicating that Epic (ahem) "plans" to display a button leading to their own payment solution alongside a button leading to Apple's payment solution must be deemed as optimistically misleading at best and an outright lie at worst. Recent history has shown us that Epic is perfectly happy to break contracts to which they had previously "agreed" -- and which made them crap-tons of money, by-the-way -- therefore, nothing that Epic claims, in writing, verbally,
pictorially or otherwise, can be considered trustworthy. Further, recognizing that Epic's long game here is to maximize profits and to convince as many of their players as possible to opt for Epic's payment solution... it should be pretty obvious that Apple's payment solution is going to entirely disappear from that screen just as soon as Epic feels they can get away with it.
It won't happen immediately, and it probably won't even happen all at once. Consider what has
already happened: The original Epic payment system implementation -- the unauthorized one that started this entire debacle -- offered an outright
discount for choosing to use their payment system over Apple's. The proposed payment buttons in the screenshot no longer offer that discount; rather, they offer non-monetary "Epic Rewards" instead, which can only be used in the Epic Store. Further, the current deal is 20% -- but the
fine print states that this is a temporary promotion which drops back down to 5% in August.
Are you seeing a trend here? This is
exactly the same as Darth Vader twisting Lando around his finger, as he quips, "I am altering the deal... pray I don't alter it any further." So yeah... anyone with even an ounce of sense knows not to trust Vader to stick to the deal.
Likewise for Tim Sweeney and Epic.