Task before tool is the same lie perpetuated by Apple users since the nineties. It's earlier incarnation was the blatant falsehood "It just works." Yes, it does "just work" if the "work" you do is "just" what Steve Jobs and Apple envision. If you're a Mac user, you're generally either blissfully stuck in Mac routines, ignorant of the capabilities unavailable to you, or you're a Terminal typing techie who would be at home using any operating system (which does make one wonder why you pay top dollar for outdated hardware and limited software...) Luckily Microsoft has the clout to do their own thing, but things haven't always been so rosy in the portable world.
Their iDevices are unusable for me. I had a 30GB Creative Nomad Jukebox 6 or 7 years ago that beat the pants off any iPod I've used, mostly because Creative was focused on making the best music player possible. It included EQ and more advanced audio processing, the ability to make playlists on the fly, and acted as simple removable storage when plugged into a computer (thus bypassing the need for a godawful "user friendly" DRM interface like iTunes). It also had more than one button, which allowed advanced navigation without looking at the thing which was important while driving. It also had a "car mode" feature where it would turn off when external power was shut off and resume state when the car turned on, making it function just like an in-dash CD player.
Unfortunately Apple came out with the iPod and made portable media players more about fashion than capability, and the products sold so well that the market followed, meaning that current media players are either iDevices or ripoffs. It's taken several years, but Android has finally come along and opened up development to people who want to use their devices in advanced ways, and we're getting uniquely capable devices from lots of different manufacturers.
The ironic thing about the "task before tool" argument is that most Apple users (especially iDevice users) don't care at all about tasks. They care about toys and shiny devices, about reassuring words from their colleagues about how cool or slick their new tech is. They're not buying iPads because they fill a void or do something that desperately needed doing - they're buying it to play Angry Birds or Plants vs. Zombies. They're cramping their hands gleefully trying to use it as a laptop, ignoring the fact that if they spent the same money on an actual laptop they'd have something more capable and usable. Apple is a marketing company first, a hardware company second, and a software developer third. They don't care about making things easier to do, they care giving you something easy to do and making you want to do it.
