There is nothing wrong with Apple's strategy, as clearly a good segment of the market wants that sort of structure and consistency and is willing to sacrifice variety and choice to get it. Buying an iPhone is fairly safe, because even if you don't do a lot of research, you know it is going be a pretty good product. I do think this will limit Apple's market share, in the future, though.
If WinMob7 wanted to be a huge success it should have tried to out Android, Android, by giving manufacturers more freedom to produce phones they believe the public wants, only making a better OS than Android.
I do think it was important to initially get WinMob7 running on some very high end hardware, but it should not be required for all WM7 phones. I think they fell a bit short in this, as the first WM7 phone is basically a Samsung Galaxy S which is a very good phone, but is about 3 or 4 months old. Microsoft should have launched on hardware that was ahead of the market, rather than playing catch up.
Microsoft has dropped the name windows mobile (that refers to the old line of phones). The new phone is referred to as Windows Phone 7.