I agree with you, even if many of the pundits say that Apple was left in the dust.

At some point, the real cost of inference/intelligence is going to come due, and the existing open source models will be good enough for 95% of tasks users want (or training their own model(s) will be inexpensive for Apple).

Apple will be there, as usual, to provide secure, on-device, faster inference that the vast majority of their customers will be fine with. Let everyone incur the R&D costs.