The paper
Standards and specs: The ins and outs of USB published on the IBM DeveloperWorks website provides a detailed analysis into the adoption and usage of USB, and Apple's role in that acceptance. The pertinent section of that document:
Being picky, that's not a "paper", it's an "article". It's not a scholarly work, just an opinions piece.
I wonder what Seebach would say regarding the fact that PS/2 ports are still shipped on some PCs. By 1995, those PS/2 ports should have ben virtually extinct, but they're still on machines in 2012! I bet that SJ would chuckle. This one small feature shows rather dramatically what "Think Different" really means.
A lot of what it means is that people still have their old keyboards, and it costs roughly $0 not to include those ports. Specialty hardware still exists -- I don't know if they're around right now, but the DataHand keyboard I used for quite a while was PS/2 only. (And required a special "high power" PS/2 to USB adapter, no less. Ugh.)
I'd also be interested in Seebach's commentary about Apple's usage of high-power current draws for charging the iPhone and iPad. The 5W and 10W usage is well beyond the USB power spec. The out-of-spec usage is not a hazard, but it does artificially penalize devices that are completely within the USB spec. If some compliant USB adapter won't charge your iPad, that's really the fault of Apple and not the manufacturer of that adapter.
I am sorely torn on that. Moreso because other devices (ASUS transformer, B&N's Nook Color) also use those high power draws... but because it's a non-standard, you can't just swap parts. So I have a Nook Color, with a special Nook only 2.1A USB adapter, and get this,
a special cable -- it won't charge off a regular USB cable, because their solution involved custom port construction in some way.
I really do think that lots of devices should be bus powered, but I can't see a sane way for developers to coerce everything into 2.5W. Honestly, I think the USB3 spec should have mandated a larger power capacity. (I mean, it did increase capacity some, but I really wish it had gone a bit further for applications like this.)
Second, I'd ask if you were familiar with the dynamics and implications of the
power law (colloquially called the 80/20 rule). As Peter Seebach eloquently notes, the interest in USB from Apple users is what made all the difference.
While the plural of "anecdote" is not "data", I would observe that around the time the iMac came out, Intel had released a USB camera. I saw people returning it because they had no USB. I also had a pair of Toshiba PCs which used USB for special gizmos. (They had special monitors, and then they had special USB driven input devices which gave them a little LCD screen and some inputs like a volume knob and such.) These devices were for Windows 95-some-special-version, and it was basically impossible to make them work. You had to download many specialized drivers and patches and such, and it was a huge struggle with exact versions -- and the two of them I had were
not interchangeable, each only working with one specific version of the special driver.
By the time of Windows 98, my NetBSD machines worked perfectly with USB mice, as did my Macs. Windows, plugging in a USB mouse would result in 5-10 seconds of input device lockup and driver loading and so on, after which it would probably work. NetBSD, if I plugged the mouse in, I literally could not move my hand back to it fast enough to touch it before it was responsive. The Mac was more comparable to NetBSD.
Some of this is still true now. I was already to be furious with APC for not including Mac support in their current UPS lines, but then I noticed that their offhand "use the native shutdown feature" corresponded to a multi-page PDF document explaining how. Turns out that if I plug a UPS in via USB, it just shows up perfectly configurable and very convenient in Energy Saver.
The adoption of TB will not take the same path as USB. The world is far more complicated today, and a corresponding "clean break" from existing technology is not feasible. It will be interesting to see how the adoption of TB plays out over time.
I am pretty curious about it myself. I'm still sad that not everything has Firewire, and that there's no easy way to get many more USB ports -- yes, I know about hubs, but some music gear tends to do Unexpected Things when connected via a hub. Latency sucks.

I also dislike that my Air only has two ports. If I leave a Logitech receiver in one (I do like their keyboards and mice), that means I need either a hub or only one other device at a time. Frustrating.
It says a lot about the state of the world, and the durability of hardware specs, that the biggest problem I'm having right now is the lack of a way to get a Mac with a 50-pin SCSI connector. (And yes, I know about USB and FireWire adapters. Every one I know of got discontinued by the end of 2011.)
For what it's worth, I expect to get a couple of those Matrox docks.
----------
Today with my 13" MBP, I cannot fathom the need for a dock.
Huh. I find the lack painful.
With just two wires ( power cord and display cord) my remote setups look clean and elegant, and not "as clumsy or random as a blaster."
Macbook Air: Display cable, power cable, audio cable. If I'm at home, I am NOT using those tinny little speakers.
Macbook Pro: Display, power, audio, ethernet, firewire, and at least one USB cable. I have a Henge dock, love it to bits. But I still wish I had a "real" dock.
The thing is... I don't buy computers which have multiple ports because I want extra case ventillation. I buy them so I can hook the ports up to things. Docking stations are lovely, and one of the things I really miss about using PC laptops.