Jobs was an amazing business man, he knew when to bring a product in house, and when it was better to use someone else's IP and resources (but brand it as their own as much as possible, like the whole Siri/Wolfram thing). And in the end he always pushed to bring all things in house, but not roll them out until they had the better solution, or at least a solution that was relatively elegant and played well with their devices.
With Jobs gone I think we are going to see more and more of these types of issues/programs cropping up. Apples' board of directors has always tended to move things towards a closed environment, but Jobs was ballsy enough to tell them when they were wrong. When Jobs was fired Apple fell apart because they closed in on themselves, cut key ties to business partners, and they forgot to look outside of their own ideals of what a computer should be to see what people wanted. When Jobs came back he moved the focus a little away from the closed ecosystem, and focused on having computers that were attractive to look at (which later evolved into removing the separate computer box entirely, and then the whole 'thinness' movement), and having a user experience that required as little interaction and input from the user as possible to make things go and work. It made for a machine that makes users like myself feel like their hands are tied when we try and use a mac, but for the general public they are excellent machines that fill most of their needs with very little fuss in an attractive package.
But now that Jobs is gone for good we are already seeing that Apple is moving in that tightly closed environment again, cutting ties with other companies that it sees as threats because of their own paranoia, when really a company like Google could be a huge ally.
That is something I have always been impressed with on the MS side of things; MS has made a tentative peace with Apple, while providing patent lease agreements to Google to the point where MS makes more money off of every Android sale than Google does. Thus the reason why they came so late to the phone party, and why it took them so long to really put any weight behind the WP platfom; why spend the effort to make your own platform when you can make more money off of the established platform than the platform makers do?
Not saying MS is a company full of saints (far from it, they are still greedy SOBs), but MS has been able to make their money while crating a stable environment for other companies to make a boat load of money, while Apple is a closed echo-chamber that either buys or crushes everything in sight. Apple makes some great and compelling products, but they tend to limit outside innovation, while MS tries to make a platform for outside innovation to function within. It is my hope that MS will bring this same type of platform philosophy to the phone market as well... but so far it does not look that promising.