"Not living in the past at all. Apple is still the sole source for most of the hardware and the OS, if Mac was king of the heap it would be two monopolies instead of one." You are misinformed. The core of the Mac OS (Darwin UNIX) is open source and can be ported to any platform. Most of the hardware is industry standard and interchangable with PCs. The hardware that is proprietary is the ASICs - and that situation exists for Wintel computers too.
"The person here with their head in the sand is the one that thinks they get free software on their more expensive computer."
I get free software for my Mac all the time. A lot of it is Mac-specific, but a lot of it is Linux software that is simply recompiled to run on PowerPC. Apple provides free software for Macs and PCs, like iTunes and QuickTime. And Apple includes a bunch of applications with each Mac that is superior to what Microsoft includes with Windows.
How many companies make OSes that run on Macs? How many make motherboards that can run the OS? Dual monopoly no matter how you slice it. Tell AMD about Intel's harware monopoly.
Everything Mac includes with the OS, just like everything MS includes with the OS, cost the purchaser of the OS money. they just don't charge you as seperate line items, but the cost of development was in the budget for making the OS and that cost is figured into the sales price and passed on to the purchaser. Anybody claiming any pre-bundled software is "free" needs to take some business classes, regardless of who the software comes from.