I think this update is the complete opposite of that trend - Apple is trying to do a ton of new things all at once (ads, game center, multitasking, etc.), almost too much in my opinion.
Apple is looking to establish and to extend their beachheads in both the smartphone and tablet spaces, and this is how you do that. You invest design and development and debug and test. Big-time.
Being a response of marketing and features for the Microsoft Windows Phone 7 and the HP Slate announcements, this looks quite potent.
And interestingly, this approach looks quite reminiscent of how Microsoft slid in a new (Windows) computing platform from up underneath its competitors way back in the 1990s, too.
