"added some fluff, made things simpler, and marketed the idea"

Well what on earth do you need a pre-assembled computer for? You just take some circuit boards and a soldering iron, then assemble everything over the weekend and you have a perfectly good computer. I don't understand why this Apple I thing is so popular, it's nothing special.

Far as I can tell, every successful piece of tech out there can be reduced to "Added some fluff, simplicity, and marketing to an already existing technology"

They also created an operative system (sure, it builds on existing tech but they added a lot more than just fluff).

It is a simple abstraction of something that many people find very complicated - or choose to not spend time understanding / configuring.

(You could say same about Github, Travis etc.)

There's probably some fair value in making things simpler, not to mention value in marketing. If they can form a large community around it through their marketing, then the tooling will rapidly improve. So, the marketing can be a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.

Honestly, I have no idea if the software I write runs on FreeBSD. I know it runs on Linux, and therefore I know I can package it with Docker.

And I think that's the crux of it--do you think anyone would use Heroku if its container environment were FreeBSD-based? I'm guessing not; nobody develops on FreeBSD, so they'd have to test on a separate FreeBSD VM before deploying.

Lots of people seem to develop on Macs, so Linux is a VM to them. And if it runs on a Mac it probably runs on FreeBSD. Joyent seems to be managing with non-Linux containers too.

That's a shame, FreeBSD is actually a pretty impressive OS. You should give it a try, mono-cultures aren't a good thing.