Yeah, how is this in any way beating Apple? Apple uses Samsung displays for the retina Macbooks. Samsung and Sharp making better displays is useful to Apple, it isn’t competition for them.
I definitely understand Apple’s reasons for having their own versions of the core services/apps. Maps, email, calendar, etc. are all things that Apple doesn’t want to rely on a third party to provide for their platform.
However I don’t see any real benefit to Apple in keeping people locked to those services as the platform defaults. I definitely understand not wanting every app you download to bombard you with “Please set me as the default!!” dialog boxes like you see with some desktop web browsers, but a way to dig into the Settings app and change it if you really want would work well.
