It's time for Apple to step in and show everyone how it's done. Of course, once this happens, a lot of people will develop selective amnesia, as it happened with phones.
The TV ecosystem is basically the Apple playbook to a T: let the competitors try to design a more computer-esque smart version of a dumb device. Laugh heartily at their shitty UX that is limited by their lack of vision and unwillingness to take real risks, and let them do the market research for you. Make one that doesn't suck and is ridiculed by the media since those products "already exist." Get 80% market share in a few years while competitors scramble to keep up and suddenly all new TVs lift Apple design features. Settle in on the high end consumers who are willing to pay for attention to detail with margins that would make your competitors blush.
"Smart TVs" right now are Android before the iPhone. Slightly more polished yet fundamentally flawed versions of an old paradigm. People seem to forget that the early versions of Android were basically "open source Blackberry OS."
When AAPL plummets because people think they do not have an economic moat, I look at the lack of true innovation in the TV market as evidence that no, in fact, nobody has been able to replicate the core of Apple's design genius yet. The iTV is going have to invent new interaction methods that are much more natural and intuitive for people sitting on a couch channel surfing than buttons on a laggy infrared remote control. As per the iPhone/iPad, these design interactions are going to require a fundamental re-thinking and re-building of the entire user interface of a television. You can bet that these things will be copied aggressively (and poorly, at least initially) and lawsuits abound.