In 2010, Apple wasn’t exactly a beleaguered company. It wasn’t like NVidia not reimbursing Apple would break the bank. Apple should have repaired it just to protect its reputation.
Jobs himself was famous for saying to high level employees that at a certain level of authority, you don’t get to make excuses.
Again, I agree with you, apple should have launched the program much, much earlier.
But, I mean, that's besides the point because this isn't a post about how Apple handled these failing GPUs, it's about Nvidia's inability to work with others.
To be fair, the issue was mainly caused by Apples form-over-function thermal design.
To best of my knowledge, Nvidia GPUs works just fine in all other laptops.
Laptops were only affected en masse because they have far more heat-cool thermal cycles than the average desktop computer.
Nvidia bumpgate says hello.
Since 2014, apple has almost exclusively used AMD graphics cards in computers that do have discrete GPUs, and I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest this was motivated with their terrible experience with Nvidia.
(I'm aware I'm not really backing this up with evidence, but I think the publicly available facts about the whole situation support this narrative)