A company can't give off that aura when their products sell 100s of millions. Apple maintained it for longer than anyone else ever did though.
Did they ever really have that aura? I mean, I'm a Mac fanboy. I've argued with you about Apple a thousand bajillion times on this site. I watch the keynote. But I never got into it because it was a cult thing. I got into it because every blog I liked reading took some time to talk about loving Apple (Shaun Blanc, John Gruber, John Welsh, even Paul Graham), and so I took some time out to try the computers and I reall…
OSX users often look down on Windows users, as if they just don't know better. They say things like "OSX is inherently better than Windows" without specifying what it's better at or pausing to consider that there are many reasons to choose an OS, and by a very large number of metrics (compatible programs, compatible hardware, price, variety, ease of finding someone who can help you with problems, etc.) Windows crushes OSX. In fact, by almost any easily quantifiable measure, Windows is better.
Apple's been the hip underdog, ironically largely because of spending billions of marketing bucks to style themselves that way, and I think Steve Jobs's tyranny over the tech-related media.
I'm not saying any of that about you personally, but things like Digg turning into an extension of Apple's PR don't happen to any other brands at all, not even ones like Toyota or Lenovo that consistently make top quality products. The fervor indicates there's a lot more to the fanboyism than just "Apple makes good products." They've struck a chord. Their marketing over the past 5 years may be the best in the entire history of capitalism.
The problem is that Apple users includes everyone who owns an iPod or iPhone, most of whom don't use any other Apple products. You can't keep the underdog luster on the company as a whole when you achieve ubiquity, but they still do with their computers.