The very foundation their ecosystem runs on is free and open source, and up for grabs for forking and modification. However, their proprietary app store is not, and neither is force-loading my own custom apps. In my point of view, this is where I see the contradiction.

Granted the worldwide open source community has had and has nearly zero interest in making a darwin distro with a minimalistic tiling window manager, or anything similar. Yet I see gnu/linux developers create dozens of linux distros and dozens of functionally identical window managers. So much for side-rant.