Underrated how? There's too many egos and confirmation bias going on at Apple. Apple is poaching top talent and buying out companies but it hasn't helped them one bit in terms of software.
My 2¢/guess is that Apple has actually been putting a huge chunk of its time/resources into API development. They've delivered an insane amount of functionality to the developer community in the last few years—so much so, that it's hard for us to keep up! So, as far as consumer-facing software output, sure, they've been a bit patchy. But what's happened underneath, for developers to dig into, has been pretty vast, imho.
Anyway, hopefully it's time for them to sit back a bit on that front, polish what they have, and start actually exploiting their APIs themselves, to kick up the level of their own platforms.