I've seen accolades about Apples reliability from doing this, and asked if anyone thought the industry would be better off today if Microsoft had adopted that same model early on, instead of writing the OS to be as hardware agnostic as possible and letting the hardware industry develop around it.
So far no one will say they think it would.
The desktop computer came into being without local networks, let alone the Internet. What we're coming to now is a computing world where it doesn't matter much what platform you're using; networks are TCP/IP, files are increasingly in formats based on open standards, and applications can and often do run on servers with a platform-agnostic browser as the user interface.
The question is whether this sort of open exchange would have come about sooner if DOS/Windows had not become a de facto standard -- if we had IBM PCs, Macs, Amigas, and maybe even OS/2 boxes. Probably not.
Cheap commodity hardware running Windows was the Model T of the Internet. It's easy to write flowery, nostalgic odes to the Model T which was, let's face it, it was a pretty crappy car. But it opened the road to millions of people who would go on to get something more reliable, more powerful and infinitely more comfortable.
You could make the argument that if DOS hadn't become the standard, something else would have. That's likely true, but without the might of IBM behind it, it would have taken a lot longer for computers to become inexpensive and attractive enough to get into people's homes. In a world without IBM PC clones, we might be talking about the Mac as an alternative to the Amiga; Commodore had the biggest installed base in homes when DOS and the Mac entered that market.