While licensing (without a doubt) is a big issue, I think the infrastructure that Apple have in place for manufacturing and sourcing of materials is second to none.

This is only possible due to forward thinking people and a ridiculous amount of demand, the two together mean bulk buying prices available to them only.

The competition will catch up at some point, but I fear that it might require a couple huge mergers for this to happen.

And not just "the cost of Windows" and the less-mentioned "the cost of Pentium", but that both must be created to be general-purpose enough to work with any implementation of either - to wit, more overhead costs that don't pay off for particular instances. This vs Apple building both the OS and hardware for each other and nothing else. There's a whole lotta bulk from M$ and Intel products that Apple doesn't have to provide nor charge for.