Earlier quoted context omitted.
And what happens if there's a file type the OS doesn't support? In my case that often happens with mkv files. How do I tell iTunes (or any other music player) to import some of the music on my USB drive? iTunes doesn't even allow you to do that with iPods...
I would say you're out of luck then. What good are those mkv files if you don't have an app to read them? There are a lot of things I'm used to doing on a computer that I can't do on an iPad. Everyone has their examples of things that make X inferior to Y. Apple has shown that they can be successful by offering less of "business as usual" while slowly introducing new ways of doing things. The only way to advance the…
I have a really nice app to read them called Media Player Classic -- I just don't have an app to manage them. Writing apps to manage every single file type I have is very inefficient compared to using a general purpose file manager. You abstract out often-used code rather than copy-pasting it all over the place, don't you?
The only way to advance the state of the art is to let go of a lot of the notions of what we think a computer should be.
The fundamental definition/theorem/axiom/whatever of computer science is the Church-Turing thesis. We haven't come up with a practical notion of computability more general than that, so it is by default the state of the art. Following from that, I think a computer should be a real-life manifestation of a universal Turing machine -- something that can run anything computable (taking into account resource bounds but also providing all the resources it can) without being beholden to another entity. Anything less is an appliance, a toy, and is not fit to be called a computer.