I think Apple would win out for these two reasons:
1. The Linux community is too fractured. (Meaning you have your Ubuntuphiles and your PCLinuxOS-ites and the Xandrosians and the Linspire-whatevers and the SUSE-whatevers and the Fedoraphiles.)
2. No one Linux distribution company has the marketing power of Apple. I would dare say they don’t have even 1/10th Apple’s marketing power. Apple can afford huge multi-million dollar ad blitzes. The Linux distro companies cannot afford the same and must rely basically on “word of mouth” advertising, aka the “Jack Tramiel method”, and IIRC, the last Tramiel company that relied on the “Jack Tramiel method” went out of business and got sold to a disk drive manufacturer (yes, I’m talking about when Atari went out of business and merged with Jugi Tandon Storage).
........1. The Linux community is too fractured........
I’m not sure that’s really a major argument.
Consider Toyota, Lexus, Scion...... There are countless companies out there that differentiate their products.
Athlon, Opteron, Duron, Core, Pentium, Celeron, ViiV...........
Why wouldn’t commodity operating systems be any different? Granted, it’s different because “linux” isn’t a central office/controller the way “microsoft” or “toyota” is, but the end result is largely the same. Even Apple differentiate their product offerings.
.......No one Linux distribution company has the marketing power of Apple.........
Yeah, I happen to also believe that Apple is winning. Long term is another story, because of how fast F/OSS evolves.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1939147/posts?page=6#6