“You can’t really believe that means anything about the products or the companies, right? It’s only about price tags. “
It’s about perceived value. Performance, appearance, functionality, and price all feed into the calculation of value. Most people do not buy on price alone. They may decide the higher price is not justified when the other factors are nearly equal.
I think we're only debating degree, not absolutes.
What you say is true of a mid-range segment of the consumer market (for any given product), where price matters but some intelligent trade-offs are made on features, quality, etc. against price. No argument that that segment exists.
Above that mid-segment, things like feature set, brand loyalty, quality of manufacture, support, etc. are more important than price -- Apple lives there. Below that mid-segment, price is paramount, and all else is secondary -- low-mid and low-end features, so-called "value-priced", store-brand, knock-off, goods that in some cases are almost a parody of the real product; and for most product categories, that segment has the highest number of purchases.
Without sales numbers for that matrix we can't really argue quantitatively, but qualitatively, I think we're saying the same thing, and only disagreeing on how large the various segments are relatively. So in the absence of numbers, we can give that a rest.