Don't be an apologist. To introduce your own feature and stopping there, declaring the problem solved (when this article claims the solution doesn't work as well as the third party ones did) is irresponsible. If this is the road they want to take, the right way is to introduce any and all public hooks needed to create a solution, and then, importantly, make the Apple one use only public APIs.
But it seems they chose to be significantly more lazy and bigger jerks than that. And here you come with the 7 point plan to say they are really commendable instead.
Introducing all the public hooks to make this possible puts us back in the situation where some apps can monitor and collect data on usage of other apps.
But it seems they chose to be significantly more lazy and bigger jerks than that. And here you come with the 7 point plan to say they are really commendable instead.