First of all: I just read the first few paragraphs (yeah, work day will commence pretty soon, and there is only so much time left) and so I don’t know if you covered that ground later on, but, here goes: Apple never was an innovative company in the trenches, it observed the market and, when it felt the time was right, swooped in with a product that tried to give a well-rounded consumer experience (maybe implementing other, already mature products) while trying to avoid the mistakes of competitors.
Case in point: The first Mac got its user interface mostly from Xerox, but still, apple is credited with doing the first GUI. The iPod came into the market only after a whole bunch of competitors had already offered their take on mp3 players. The iMac was only a repackaging of NextOS together with some pepped up all-in-one hardware (implementing USB, an interface developed elsewhere, but which was mature enough to push onto the market) that was always the hallmark of Apple (the all-in-one part). The iPhone: not the first smartphone, but the most complete product. iPad: dito. Most of the time Apple didn’t get it right in the first iteration, but subsequent iterations took care of that.
Apple Watch is a product where the first iteration does not yet get it right, the current MacBook also still does not get it right (one USB C connector? rlly???) but hopefully will hit the sweetspot in the next iterations.
When Apple truly innovated (aka the Newton, which I loved) it was hit or miss, although, specifically, if they had kept the Newton around as long as AppleTV or the MacMini, maybe something would have come of it.

What I am concerned with right now and why I never jumped onto the iOS bandwagon, although I had been working on an Apple laptop ever since the Powerbook 100 is that Apple, after the original MacOS X innovation spurt (brought in, as I am re-emphasizing, through the acquisition of NextOS) is falling behind on some aspects of innovation that are important to me and, in that area, tell the user what they want. Which still works for most of the users (I hope, AAPL is the biggest item in my stock portfolio), but not for me. I came in via PalmOS in the mobile arena, my first smartphone was a Hagenuk S200, after that two Palm Centros. I had TRGPros (the Palm with the CF card), Tungsten T3 (with an SD card) and did my first GPS with what was called a bluetooth GPS mouse at the time. I accessed the mobile internet via bluetooth modem from my Tungsten T3, mostly checking out public transport schedules while on the go.
Which is to say that, when the iPhone came onto the market, mobile internet, a decent, mature mobile OS and a phone that did my spreadsheets and text documents, was hardly a novelty for me, but I wanted external memory (for backup — fuck the cloud, my nudie shots will not be on the internet:-P) and GPS, which Apple did not offer. Also, even at that time, I was already waiting for the first smartwatch. So, my next smartphone (after the Hagenuk and two Centros) was a Sony Xperia X10 mini, basically a bulky smartwatch in size, without the wristband, but with all the bells and whistles: 2.6" screen, GPS, UMTS, µSD, µUSB, ANT+ (I am a cyclist), two-day battery life. Used it as a navigation and speedometer on my bike, charged from my hub dynamo. When the Xperia Active came around, waterproofness was added to the package, which got a little bigger, now clearly out of smartwatch range (if you ignore the Rufus Cuff), but Apple, at the time, never offered the innovation I was looking for.
I am on my second Xperia Z compact now (Z5, to be precise, a wonderful developmental upgrade to the Z1 compact), they still are waterproof, still serve as my bike navi when I am on a tour, in the meantime I have a 128 GB µSD card with partitions for my MP3s, movies and computer Application partition. Android 6 finally lets me mount partitions without jailbreaking (never was much into that, too much time fiddling with the setup) and it feels more like a real operating system, with file system access, etc.

Apple, to me, missed the boat on expandable memory, ruggedness and features for a power user. Handwriting recognition worked great with Graffiti on PalmOS. Apple tells you, you don’t need all that. Want more memory? - load your stuff up to iCloud, so that every hacker and government agency can snoop around. Or wait for the next hardware iteration with more of the stuff.
Mobile GarageBand is maybe nice, if you don’t come from Logic Studio on the Mac and thus expect more. The potential of implementing full OS X with a touch UI, stylus and handwriting recognition, instead of a dumbed-down, finger-pointing, modal kiddy-iOS on tablets, was squandered. Well, multiple windows are coming (in Android) but the hardware to run that stuff has been there for a while now. Maybe the first couple iPad iterations did not have the brawn to do full OS X, but not any more. For the dumbed-down version, you could have put a iOS skin on OS X, so that mum and dad don’t feel to alienated and the kiddies can feel like hacks although all they do is facebook and snapchat.
My current gripe with my MacBook Air 11": Apple has locked hardware updates for that model. I can get a 1 TB SSD update on a 13", 2012 MBA, but not on my mid 2013 model. I finally got a great AC adapter (the Zolt, look it up) that works with the MagSafe and don’t need those overpriced bricks with the fraying cables, that never get replaced on warranty. But I am going to hang onto that little bugger until a usable version of the MacBook 12" comes around. Or Ubuntu has something that offers me all the bells and whistles that Logic Studio and FinalCut Pro do.
Oh, and I cannot wait to get my hands on the Nixon The Mission. The Sony Smartwatch 3 did not survive two dips in the pool, thankfully amazon took it back no questions asked (I used it well within the specs, but when it comes to water damage, it is usually a lot harder to claim warranty, even if you used the hardware well within their IP-rating). The Casio tough watch is a frustrating joke without GPS, I won’t even buy a tryout version; the SW3 was at least useful, except for the water part.
But that is a problem that you won’t even have with the Apple Watch. Throw it into the water, if it drowns, it’s on you.

So, in summary, Apple is missing the boat in terms of innovation more often than not, as far as I am concerned, which might not show up in their bottom line for the next few years (I certainly should hope so, at least as long as they are part of my portfolio), but the pioneering times of OS X are simply wearing (too) thin.