I understand the point that the article author is trying to make, but there are obvious issues with a scenario where Apple is a dominant force in the Home Theater market.
First off, I agree with most all the points about usability and the seemingly ridiculous restrictions imposed by the lack of foresight, attention to detail and to the customer experience, and many other aspects of home theater that plague newcomers to the hobby.
However, this chaos actually breeds choice and drives innovation. Unfortunately, that means that a certain amount of chaos is the price we pay for those advantages.
I have first-hand experience with several generations of iPods, an iPad 2, and an iPhone 3GS. I have never owned an Apple computer, Apple TV, or other Apple hardware product.
I have to hand it to Apple in that they deserve the crown they hold as the king of the portable device market. I have evaluated alternatives to every single product I just mentioned, and none have the overall support, user experience, and attention to detail that Apple puts into its products.
They have done this by emphasizing simplicity over flexibility, and while that's a strong suit when it comes to those devices, it would be a very bad thing in the home theater world, in my opinion. To keep things simple, they remove functionality that has the chance of creating problems, no matter how useful they may be. What's left is a less capable device, but one that for the most part "just works" and does so with a level of competence not found in most other devices. As a reward to itself for its efforts, Apple commands a premium for delivering that ease of use and the user experience.
Apply that to the home theater market, and you would have the following:
1) only one manufacturer of primary devices.
Instead of several manufacturers of receivers from which to choose, you would have one. From that one manufacturer, you would have at most 3-6 different SKU's for that product.
The same would be for source devices. The problem here is that Apple is big into digital media, and has historically considered Blu-ray to be a "bag of hurt." Therefore, we would not have Blu-ray discs, but rather, we would be downloading/streaming all of our movies from the iTunes store.
2) much less choice of features
In a world like Apple defines it, there would not be different video and audio codecs. We would have had one video codec, and it would most likely have been H.264. Probably not the worst thing in the world. But what about sound? Because we're talking about Apple, it would be AAC, but if we're just talking about a world like one that Apple would run, we would have either Dolby or DTS, not both.
Given that online delivery would be the norm, we could probably kiss lossless sound goodbye. The video quality of that feed would also only be as high as the iTunes servers could handle and that Apple decided was an acceptable level of quality. Given their track record with audio in the iTunes store, we would not have the video and audio quality that we enjoy today on Blu-ray.
3) much higher prices
All the work put into a refined user experience and the closed system that delivers the simplicity that the original author seeks will require a pound of flesh when it comes to the price of the hardware.
That $1,000 Yamaha receiver that does everything 95% of what a vast majority of the public needs in a receiver? It's now going to be 60-100% higher in price.
There would be no such thing as a sub-$100 Blu-ray player. If they were even available, the entry level model would probably be $199 and go up three tiers from there with minimal increases in features (if you look at most of Apple's portable product tiers, they all do the same things, and the difference is in memory capacity or other non-core features, such as 3G data service).
The flip side is that we would probably have what the author is seeking. A much simpler, straightforward, and elegant ecosystem that would bring home theater to the masses at a certain level of performance. Much like what Apple did when it introduced the iPod and eventually took over the portable audio player market.
I would hate for that to be the only choice, though. One of the great things about the home theater hobby is that it is a hobby. Enthusiasts can tweak their systems and get more from them as they learn more about it.
Some people are into that, and some people aren't. It would be great if there were systems out there that would cater to those that want a good easy to use system without any hassle. It's quite possible that those people would be willing to pay the premium to get that. Maybe we'll see something like that from Apple, as Steve Jobs was quoted as saying that he'd finally cracked the television challenge.
I can't help but think that, with a little assistance from someone who is knowledgeable, most people can have a simple home theater that "just works" a majority of the time, all for a price that is a fraction of what it would be using the Apple-style way of doing things.
