Well, imagine what Apple would have lost if they took another two years to work out these features with nothing actually on the market. They smartly decided being a first mover with a completely radical design would outweigh ticking off every box in the feature list.
Besides, both those features are purely a software matter--a perfect place to iterate after the hardware is in people's hands.
The flip side is that sometimes a company can be too "clever" trying to invent something better when they could just copy.
For example, Microsoft waffled for years before adding tabs to IE. They wanted to find a better way manage multiple pages. I think most people still prefer tabs to their "clever" image thumbnail thing. So all they did was waste a few years not implementing an existing feature that their customers were all asking for.
This blog entry reads like a Malcom Gladwell story with it's selection bias. Innovating in itself is not enough if the features you're spending time on are not going to be a big success. That's why you still need to keep copying successful features from competitors. They've already done most of the hard work.
I think most people still prefer tabs to their "clever" image
Tabs is web browsers are evidence of some fundamental brokenness with the web. I think Microsoft's designers probably instinctively hated the idea, just like Apple's probably did (Safari didn't (doesn't?) have tabs turned on by default).
It's far from clear to me that most people are comfortable with the concept of dynamically managed tabs. Clearly computer nerds do like them though.
