If by 'Apple' you mean 'AT&T' and by 'let you do it' you mean 'give you a direct line from your data center to AT&T subscriber location data with which you can

If by 'Apple' you mean 'AT&T' and by 'let you do it' you mean 'give you a direct line from your data center to AT&T subscriber location data with which you can approximate the feature with the Push API and no actual third party code running in the background on each phone', then I concur with your assessment.