> I claim the secret sauce to their APIs is actually a character at Apple named Ali Ozer who, along with his crew, has maintained a firm hand on the tiller, and learned a huge amount about object-oriented design for interactive systems over the past couple of decades.

I agree with this. One of the things that makes most Apple APIs great is that they are not part of the Taligent legacy that so infects other languages. They keep class hierarchies relatively flat and lean heavily on the relatively inexpensive delegation that ObjC offers. It's very refreshing and feels far more smalltalk-ish than Java-ish.