I strongly disagree. Amelio's Macworld 1997 keynote was a legendary failure, just a shocking public show of incompetence. He built zero confidence in anyone joining from NeXT. His book shows a poor understanding of what happened at Apple ("wow, I directed a VP to go write a new modern OS, and they just never did it!?!"). There was no useful depth of vision or insight coming from him or Hancock at the time (my opinion as a lead eng from that time), and it is clear to me that Apple would have continued to spiral into oblivion under their lead (like yahoo).

I'll grant that he did spark the revival by doing the NeXT deal, as Apple did need an acquisition to reboot the software stack.