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Jobs didn't break a lot of new technological ground. He was an innovator and knew how to appeal to the masses. He did not invent the mouse. He saw it at Palo Alto and saw its potential. He did not invent the MP3 or the MP3 player- he saw a way to bring it to the masses on a grander scale. I believe he was also the one who pushed for Apples to be used in educational settings. I don't know about you but from middle school through high school all we had were Apples. He also fostered the idea of Object Oriented Programming, which is basically the gold standard in programming now.
To the point of "Apple products hit the market and made all other products obsolete", I disagree. Somewhere I have a picture of a dumpster full of year old iBooks from college. The Apple III is still a big black eye to some people there. Some of their products are runaway success stories while others are failures. And you can credit the new age robustness to AT&T if you want to dig.
Do I think some of the technologies would have been realized anyway? It depends. MP3 players existed before the Ipod and were growing in popularity. Personally I think the huge strides in flash memory were bigger factor in the iPod than pressure from Jobs. But he was the one who packaged it up in a nice little unit that was easy for non-technical people to use. There is something to be said for that. Remember Laserdiscs? Zip Disks? Never got a big push and therefore never made it.
Is he up there with Turing, Berners-Lee, Babbage, Eckert, and Mauchly? No. Hell no. They broke new ground and came up with revolutionary concepts and ideas. What Jobs did was package technology in a way that gave it a greater success rate and that in turn drove the industry. He saw potential and helped people realize it, and that is half the equation. What good is a great design or idea with no backing or marketing?
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