It was a liver. More importantly, Jobs was not the CEO before his departure in 1986; Mike Scott was Sculley's predecessor.
Why is that important? Because in 1983, Jobs' team was the engineers working on the Macintosh. This time around, his team is in the executive suites and the boardroom. He probably had a succession plan in mind before the health scare, and he certainly does after.
Phil Schiller and Tim Cook are definitely his guys, and Jony Ive shares his design philosophy. I would hope that a post-Jobs Apple wouldn't be too slavishly tied to "What would Steve do" -- trying to appease a ghost was what almost killed Disney until Eisner and Katzenberg came in.
Just as with MS, companies get so big they cannot be innovative and react quickly to trends.
The problem with big organizations is that they can't have a shared vision. A small group of people can, but an aggregate of shareholders cannot. As long as there's a strong management team with carte blanche from the Board, Apple should be able to continue to innovate; but if Jobs' successors suffer one major flop and lose the board's confidence, they'll probably bring in some boring suits, as has happened to so many other companies. That, however, could take decades to happen.
Unfortunately, they almost killed what made Disney special. Even if a successor to Jobs doesn't think "WWJD" (hehe) he should still remember that Apple should continue to be special. Going run-of-the-mill, commodity, will kill Apple as they will become another Dell.