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The attempt of both Google and Apple to control the entire content, communication and user experience chain has come to the point where none of the parties are making any serious attempt to mask it. This has been done before - AOL, Compuserve and MSN come to mind.
In my mind Apple has selected the iPhone OS rather then the fuller OS/X because it does want more computers on the market, it want less computers and more consumer devices. I do believe that they would have take the browser out if they thought they could get away with it. It is in effect a point of sell unit, outsourced to the consumer. This is sad, because the footprint and physical design are very impressive. For all intent and purposes, the IdeaPad U1 hybrid notebook, the HP Slate or Dell Mini 5 seem more complete and competent device.
While interested more in beating the path from the consumer to the seller, Google is doing the same with it's chromeOS. It's about controlling the user consumption.
There is nothing new in trying to control an ecosystem. Microsoft has been at it for years with Outlook. Outlook begets Exchange, which begets Windows Server on one side, while maintaining the foothold of Office and Windows on the desktop. Microsoft, however, left areas which others (such as Nokia and RIM), filled. I don't know if this was done by design or by neglect.
All of this leads to powerful and closed networks. This is easier when you control as much as the ecosystem as you can. Theoretically. Just look the IBM Mainframe and AS400 and the Digital VAX. Those are extremely robust and reliable systems, mainly because they came from one vendor as one coherent system. They lost their market for the same reason. Unix allowed interoperability between system, Windows and Linux broke the tie between the hardware and software.
All of this openness and availability has, it would seem, led to consumer confusion, which Google and Apple are trying to remedy. Robust, single action devices (or appliances) connected to dedicated networks and data centers providing select quality content, at an affordable price (to the US middle class market, at least).
All this may sound as if I think this is a bad thing. It's not necessarily so, or at least not entirely so. Apple's iPad maybe one of the more powerful intensives to move to HTML5 (for working web based video without Flash, at the very least), and Google is forcing the extinction of IE6.
I wonder how this plays in the long run. When will Google move into content providing, and when will Apple provide search results? Is that a ridicules notion? As ridicules as a search engine and advertiser making phones? As ridicules as a computer company selling books and magazine?
We are watching the singularity approach, or just the involvement of the next generation of dinosaurs?
I think the latter.