Personal opinion: perhaps we're all missing the forest for the trees. I wonder if perhaps the best path forward... is basically the same as what they've done with CarPlay? Consider:
The AppleTV in its current form factor is about as optimal as it can reasonably get, in that you can connect your personal AppleTV to any old commodity display using a cheap HDMI cable, promptly granting you access to all of your subscriptions, apps and what have you (assuming an internet connection is available). It's compact and easy to toss in your luggage, so that you can plug it into the hotel's TV while you're travelling or into your parents TV when you arrive for Thanksgiving. Pretty decent, right?
One caveat is that you have to get to that AppleTV interface through whatever UI is provided by the TV vendor. That can be... suboptimal, in many cases; who knows how easy it'll be to find stuff in that interface? Some are better than others, of course... but not all are even remotely good. And of course, once you've found and switched to the input for the HDMI port that you've plugged your AppleTV into, anything involving settings on the TV itself must still be accomplished through that TV vendor's interface.
So the current crop of standalone AppleTV hardware is much like the Mac-Mini-with-any-old-monitor concept, as compared to an iMac-all-in-one concept. There are obviously advantages and disadvantages to both approaches -- but nobody is going to be carrying around their entire big screen television in their luggage... and in a market with so many incumbent brands, is there really any room for one television vendor to come in with something akin to the iMac concept? ... Even if it does happen to be Apple? (To be sure, your hotel won't be buying them -- they usually won't even spring for two-ply toilet tissue!)
Parallel to that, we have the car market. As we all know, (and as was noted in the article) Apple has abandoned their very expensive experimentation in building their own car -- however, CarPlay itself is by no means dead: in fact, conversations in this forum and in other forums have led me to the conclusion that a great many potential car buyers will immediately walk away from any vehicle on the lot which doesn't include CarPlay. (I'm among them, myself.) I think there is an interesting lesson to be learned from that -- which can be applied to the television market.
If Apple took the same approach with TVs, I think it could look something like this: like CarPlay, give TV vendors the option to implement AppleTV as an app (which as many here will know, has already been accomplished for several current TV models) but eventually give TV vendors the option to simply cede the major features of their user interface entirely to Apple -- much like CarPlay 2. Apple puts their spin on a unified TV experience, (TVPlay, maybe?) and interfaces become standardized on even super cheap TVs, such that everyone is instantly familiar with how to use it even if they've never touched that brand of TV before in their life. Different TVs are able to immediately adapt to whoever is connected as the primary viewer, such that your personalized viewing experience, logged in apps and services can all follow you -- perhaps simply by streaming portions of the interface directly off of your iPhone, much as they do with CarPlay.
Apple users win through a broader standardized interface across the TV industry designed by a company they trust, TV vendors win (just like car vendors) by providing products that they already know their customers desperately want, and Apple wins through expanding their services and subscription revenue. So much winning!
I don't know about you... but I'd buy into that in a heartbeat.
(And of course, we all know full well that if Apple does it, Android will immediately follow with their own parallel implementation... so Android users win, too!)
