A lot of the components on a bmw car are not made by bmw of course, some electronics, some shared components with other car platforms, etc. but overall the "hardware" component they produce in every car is their own, on the other hand apple with imacs and macbooks (ios devices are a slightly different story due to their cpu being present) just slaps other people's hardware, period in an enclosure. There's nothing insanely great in the engineering of macbooks and imacs, apple's doing what pretty much every other manufacturer is doing, run of the mill I should add, they are just doing it with more expensive aluminum components than most, and that's that.
Intel, amd + ati, nvidia, ti, samsung, lg, etc. are doing something that requires exquisite engineering. Of course it's not just that, it's the software as well, where apple has a decent os (was quite good, could have been great, is currently just decent because the last few years more effort is being put into ios, and hardware is getting so good, the os, doesn't have to be great) in os x and due to the complexity of developing a desktop os, and more importantly in gaining an app market and drivers and compatibilities for it, competitors who also assemble components such as lenovo, sony etc. opt for windows instead of their own solutions. Apple are good at software enginering, not great, but not average either, but no more than that. Mind you I think software engineering is hard enough that very, very few are great at, so being good at, is a huge complement I am paying to them. Having said that their recent tremendous increase to mega corporate multi billion status has NOT been followed by adequate scaling up of their software division to match the heights of their success. I can tell you know what you are talking about, so I won't go into why it's apparent this has not taken place.
I don't think windows is anymore off the shelf than os x, and part of these forums is to whine about apple too. I know people have wrongly or spitefully claimed apple is doomed countless times, I am into apple related ****, and read the forums for more than ten years. I wasn't one of them claiming this at any point in the past ten years, and if I had more money in the bank to play the stocks, I 'd be sipping cocktails at hawai at the moment (though I 'd probably still be posting here
) because I have expected apple to do really well and stomp the competition and become the multi billion beast they are, as far back as 6 years. I really wish I had the money to buy a million or two in apple stock, but I didn't. . My take now is different though. I know they have such clout, so much and so high profile retail presence, so much money in the bank, to buy up anyone with a good idea and incorporate it, so much litigious power, that it's very very hard for them to fail at the moment. But that doesn't mean that the tides won't start slowly turning on them. I get your appliance spiel, I don't necessarily disagree, but I think you over apply it here. Yeah in general that's what they are getting at. But if apple could make more money with an upgreadable computer we'd get another ideological tale to sugar coat it another way.
As for windows (I am not going linux, been there done that, too much of a hassle), 8 is growing very much on me, esp. on a tablet, cleartype looks great on it (until we get retina os x font will be shrunk and rendered mostly like **** I am afraid), the tiles are a very imaginative new paradigm, and they 've started charging very fair prices for office too (fair prices is the last thing I could say for apple though). Last I heard they got to 20,000 apps too in a month or so that they are out. As soon as someone comes up with a fairly high ppi screen that is laminated to the display (a big deal for me as I dont use my brand new ipad for that very reason) and windows 8 I am going for it. I already have drop box so icloud is pretty much irrelevant (another major fail in terms of cloud storage since they couldn't buy dropbox) and I ll be going for nice android mini tablet too and a lenovo, rugged, industrial, functional (though I am going to be dual booting os x too for a while I guess
)... ebay will be a couple of macbooks and imacs richer. I am keeping my white imac, my beloved powerbook g4 12" best notebook they every made, real tactile keyboards, great aspect ratio, best footprint than anything they currently have on the market. How insanely great this computer was, oh boy. 
