I'm mostly just not sure that the category of "home audio" is big enough for Apple to play in, full stop. Even if they "out squeezeboxed the Squeezebox" or beat the Sonos (which IMHO is a much better comparison), they'd still be in a market niche. They don't need to please audiophiles, they need to be the king of the big box store. And we all know that BB and CC (and even Tweeter) don't sell the stuff that we all buy. Hate to say it, but the market is somewhere else. When the finally do come to play in this sandbox, we're not going to be the ones buying what they come out with - it'll be the same folks who are buying Sony receivers today (e.g., almost everybody).
This last bit is just a guess, but I don't think that true hi-fi has been taking unit share from mid-fi or big-box-fi over the past ten years. It may have been taking dollar share as the super wealthy have started trading up from their old Bang & Olufsen kit to $50K or $100K rigs and $500K home theaters. What I don't think is true is that there are proportionately more people listening to high quality audio reproduction than there were a decade or two ago. I'd be happy to be proven wrong on this one if someone has the data.
Apple's specialty (as with any real high end mass hardware manufacturer) is creating a market niche and then building out units and dropping price points so they can drive their unit costs down. That's kinda antithetical to being at the cutting edge of audio quality.
Now, if you tell me that they're just going to make a transport (e.g., the iTV or whatever it's called), and that that transport is going to deliver bits just as well as a Sonos ZP80, then I can see that maybe they'll build a better GUI / controller. I have already been totally won over by the Sonos Zone Controller / ZP80 for 95%+ of my listening - purely because of convenience. And if you read the Stereophile review which says that it's difficult to tell the difference between an Ayre transport feeding a Mark Levinson DAC and a Sonos feeding the same DAC, and an Apple product meets that criteria then maybe we might be getting somewhere...
Hell, I should stop this rant - I gave up prognosticating about the direction of the computer hardware game a long time ago and just started enjoying better and better products. This is the same game - Sonos feeding a good DAC is plenty good enough for me; I'll be excited when and if a better product comes out.
J