If Sun didn't have massive amounts of cash on hand after the dot com boom, Sun would have died or been swallowed up.
Cash is King. Especially in hard times ;)
It doesn't mean that Apple has a brighter future or that it's a better investment. It may even (as you say) mean bad things. But it does mean some things. Another big tech being cashed up may mean that big consumer tech companies might start paying dividends. It might mean Apple start trying to buy other companies like MS have.
Apple is a big player that has overtaken another big player in cash, a player known for having a lot of it. So this can almost be considered an industry trend now. That's meaningful & newsworthy. I think that is meaningful. Maybe it means (like you say) that the industry that the companies (industry) is having a hard time finding valuable things to invest that cash in.
If microsoft wanted to, it could easily raise more cash by issuing more shares (or stopping the dividend as others have pointed out). The cash comparison is thus not meaningful.
That said, the comparison of real revenues and profits is tremendously interesting - Apple is within spitting distance of Microsoft on revenue and has a similar profit margin. The profit margin is what interests me. Microsoft has always enjoyed a bigger profit margin as a software company than as a hardware company. Apple is more of a hybrid, but has still managed to come away with a high profit margin.