I'm glad people like you aren't in charge of innovation. Because... damn. Yea, you could boil just about everything down to 'launch and manage apps' if you truly wanted to... and you'd overlook gems like Airplay and iCloud. These go beyond "apps" and into integration territory. You could whittle something like Siri down to "just an app" but really, you shouldn't -- it's more than that.
I'm not a starry-eyed Mac-sy
cophant, but I recognize that they've implemented features in their devices and OSes that improve a user's capabilities and quality of life, and they've done a good job of keeping these features simple and accessible while also highly functional.
Isn't AirPlay managing hardware? Before AirPlay, you had a HDMI cord, now it's, well, over the Air.
And iCloud is little more than a (admittedly fancy and huge) hard drive in North Carolina.
It's no secret that Apple is what it is because the implementations are made for humans and most of the time spot-on rather than solely a mechanism for controlling hardware functions.
And Siri is a stand-alone app that ships alongside the OS, not a core functionality.
So is the Calendar, Weather, Notes, Messages, ... App. Apple might make awesome one's , but if they weren't there, you'd find third-party ones on the App Store. And if there were no App Store, you'd be able to install them by uploading application bundles via USB.
But, when you look at OS X or iOS, you see familiar patterns, and those don't have to change because they were good right away. Of course you're amazed when you're leaving your current place and your Mac or iOS device reminds you to do groceries on the way home. But that doesn't really fall into the category of "looking differently".
