I always understood Jobs' quote as a statement about touch technology in itself. A stylus is usually used to offset a mediocre/imprecise touch handling and to make things generally easier for the implementor. For me, the reason why Jobs hated styluses is because he wanted to make a product that would have best, seamless touch recognition without needing any crutches. Needless to say they succeeded. So I think that Dave245 is spot on here — Apple Pencil is not a stylus. Its a digital artist's input device, allowing them to do things that wouldn't be possible with a finger (pencil gives you more control, fine-grained pressure, smaller touch area). It doesn't enhance or replace finger input. For normal workflows, e.g. typing, fingers are still quicker.
As to the rest of the story, of course part of Apple's marketing strategy is to have a product portfolio that would encourage you to buy as many of them as possible. But at the same time, they are trying to design these products in a way so that they fill fill their purpose in the best possible of ways (whether they succeed at it or not, is a different topic). Apple's stance has long been that tablet and laptop are functionally very different devices, are interacted with differently and thus require different design both in hardware and software. Even after all modern 2-in-1 designs, I have to say that I fully agree with Apple. While its very much possible technically to make a 2-in-1, as proven by companies like Microsoft, Dell and Lenovo, there are many design drawbacks that come with them (thicker displays which make the device top-heavy, complex engineering, restrictions on the CPU TDP, low battery duration in the tablet mode). Real problem though is software — if you try to make something that works with both touch and mouse/keyboard equally well, you'd just end up with a big disaster. Its possible for individual apps, especially if the app is focused on drawing etc., but overall? I doubt it. So Apple's strategy of making dedicated designs for two modes makes perfect sense to me. As to unification — they are supposed to introduce a new programming interface later this years, that would allow one to write apps where the same code works on both the macOS and the iOS, by adjusting the UI elements to the specific restrictions and capabilities of the target platform.
In fact, here is a little recent anecdote from my experience. I've just came back from a design exhibition where, among other things, Wacom was exhibiting some of their latest products for creative professionals. I played around with a computer which was basically a Wacom version of the Surface. It run full version of Windows and had a digital pencil. You could try out Photoshop and some other apps. The funny thing was, compared to the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, the entire thing felt a bit like last century. It was bulky, slow (apps took ages to load), the pencil had noticeable lag and I am sure that this Wacom device commanded a hefty price tag. I'm not an artist, but from what I've seen, the only benefit such a device has is size. A combination of an iPad plus a laptop — with handoff, seems to me like a much more useful combo.
