Arturia does that, and Korg did as well (making controller keyboards specific for emulating a synth, with the software running on a Mac or PC.
Downsides:
- if the software doesn’t get updated, you’re stuck running an old OS an old Mac that supports it.
- you can’t just turn on the synth and use it, you need to find a cable, connect it to the Mac, launch the software, etc
Apple was able to manage this with a much bigger market and a lot more apps (when transitioning to OS X), so while it would be hard, I think Palm could have been able to do that as well.
But as you say, the company structure, market position and a lot more worked against them (same thing with Nokia and Symbian).
Arduino/Wirings value is in what it _removed_ to give a standardised way of programming the microcontrollers.
So the "little more" part is the difference between some art student being able to create something cool vs. giving up after three days banging his head against a wall. But when you're an expert in a field it's hard to appreciate that.
In addition to the easy to install, easy to use IDE, I'd say the real innovation was a standard, idiot-proof way of programming the AVR with a well known bootloader.
From back when I was working on AVRs at university (2003-2004), I remember there were a ton of programming settings to choose from, different ways to program it (SPI, parallel), and you could easily screw up something if you set the wrong fuses, used the wrong oscillator frequency etc. All of this complexity was taken away by Wiring / Arduino, so you could focus on your project without digging through datasheets.
So the simplified IDE and social aspect was only part of the story.
Downsides: - if the software doesn’t get updated, you’re stuck running an old OS an old Mac that supports it. - you can’t just turn on the synth and use it, you need to find a cable, connect it to the Mac, launch the software, etc