I believe that all of these companies have some smart employees who are capable of tasteful design and who know about real problems with their products but who

I believe that all of these companies have some smart employees who are capable of tasteful design and who know about real problems with their products but who are screwed over by layers of self-serving bureaucracy. The project manager for some dumb feature in some corner of the OS wants to ensure their project is successful so they get a good review: that's often their key motivation. They're not as incentivized to expend engineering hours from their team and try and coordinate with 5 other teams to get something cool done. When it comes to building good stuff, having a powerful central figure like a Steve Jobs who can just murder bad features and force the implementation of good features is probably one of the best things a company can have.