A lot of their headline features gimp the user experience in some way.
Touch screens on laptops means you have to customize the UI so that each element is large enough to be tapped by a finger. So either you have to hide features to make room for these larger elements or pack the screen edge to edge, leaving a pretty cluttered interface. I'd rather have a better touch pad for precise input and without having to lift my arm from the keyboard.
Packing gaming-class hardware into a laptop leaves you with pretty terrible battery life, weight and heating issues. Something has to give. The metrics manufacturers should consider when building a portable device is performance per watt and durability vs weight. You'll always be better off money and performance-wise building a desktop PC for gaming.
Apple went with class leading storage speeds, an adaptable touch interface that's integrated with the keyboard and doesn't mess with the system UI, brought touch ID with the secure enclave, made a much larger touch pad which was already class-leading, made a considerably brighter screen - aiding outdoor use. It's a strong refresh with a premium price-tag, but you know you're buying quality when buying Apple.
You have to nail the fundamentals before you start thinking outside the box. Surface Book, for example, had an innovative form factor, but it shipped with major bugs (heating up during sleep, screen refusing to detach from the base, etc.) Shipping a neat-o feature before it's ready for prime time is pointless. E.g. OLED is a disaster for battery life right now on typical white-screen desktop workloads.
This is always where Apple has excelled eg not adding touch screens to laptops cos it's ergonomically terrible (as Steve Jobs IMHO rightly said).
Apple has also historically taken technologies that have been in the market for awhile and made them not suck. Wireless is a prime example. Anyone else remember the days where you had to setup a wifi connection by specifying encryption type and trying to figure out if you were WEP, WPA1, WPA2 or WPA2-Enterprise? Apple came long and simply let you enter a password. OSX will figure out the rest.
The problem with the new Macbooks (IMHO) is that it represents a change in philosophy. As one review said "USB-C is the future but we're living unfortunately still living in the present" (paraphrased from The Verge IIRC).
How much would it have hurt to have 2 A and 2 C ports?
This rush to market has also led to some compatibility issues between TB3 devices.
A comment I read online (on HN IIRC) went something like "we've moved from a world where if the cable fits, it works to where the cable fits and nothing works". It's a salient point: the cost of a universal connector is putting us in cable hell.
PCs have long been a case of marketing pinheads building incoherent bullet lists (ie throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks). You're seeing negative reaction because people expect more from Apple.
So it is a bit painful for the end user, but in the long run everyone benefits from quicker adoption.
For example, it would be an idiotic move for Microsoft Surface to remove USB cables and headphone jacks because as far as hardware is concerned they're an underdog.
That doesn't track with history. Apple was a huge underdog when they released the iMac and removed floppies and many non-USB ports.
They're innovating like crazy. Touch screens, OLED displays, external GPUs, different form factors, VR capable performance, etc. And many of those laptops integrated Thunderbolt 3 a while ago.
Regrettably, Apple has us all locked into their ecosystem via software so it feels like they are the only ones innovating.