Apple, for all that's said about their software being excellent (and maybe it is) is a hardware maker. As such, they try to commoditize software: make complements to their own products as cheap as possible, so that the overall cost of buying Apple is as low as possible (while keeping their part of the profits as high as possible).
They have been immensely successful at this, obviously; but that doesn't mean "the future is nearly free software"! It means, Apple is trying to commoditize software and is doing a fantastic job at it. (Much better than what Sun tried to do for example).
But the answer to this, is that software makers should try to commoditize hardware. Of course, this is much harder, since the marginal price of a piece of hardware is non-zero. It may even be impossible, but that's still what Microsoft is trying to do -- it's not trying to jump into hardware making because "that's where profits are", it's trying to attack the hardware value proposition.
> the radical shift in Microsoft’s strategy is about the fight over the profits that remain after Apple’s
No, it really isn't. (Profits are the whole point, yes -- but the question is, what kind of profits are we talking about). Microsoft wants to bring the whole value of hardware down -- it doesn't want to take hardware profits for itself, it wants to make hardware profits disappear for everybody.
(It should give the Surface away for free.)