Exactly. Many people here may be too young to recall the late 80ies, but Apple were the ones who wanted to control the operating system and the hardware, whereas Microsoft settled for "just" the OS and open hardware. Remember the Apple "look and feel" lawsuit?
They make great products, but as a developer, I'm not sure I trust them a whole lot more than Microsoft.
A remnant of that issue may be present on your desktop. I believe this works on Windows XP and it should also work on Windows Vista. Select a window. Press Alt and release. Press Space and release. The menu that is revealed is to sidestep Apple's single click window closing patent which was filed circa 1984.
But i don't see how this behaviour is related to a single click patent. Btw. it doesn't work with Firefox.
After the patent expired, the keyboard sequences were retained for power users who were already familiar with the sequences. However, the prominance of the menu has declined.
> it doesn't work on Firefox
I'm not surprised. Firefox on Windows implements its own menu primitives. Many other applications have different versions of the same libraries statically compiled. Obviously, the Firefox implementation doesn't implement a legacy window.
On the one hand, the OP reminds me of the people who were complaining about Microsoft killing firewall vendors by including basic security features in the OS -- you should expect to be destroyed if your entire business model is dependent on the elephant sleeping peacefully on one side of the cage.
On the other hand, Apple isn't creating an ecosystem with the iPhone, so much as a different type of cage. If you play by their rules, you're extremely susceptible to being squished when the elephant gets restless.