I've felt the same about their one-piece aluminium enclosures and their new unbreakable glass designs.

Again, durability is great, if it came for free then I'd take it, but you're going further and telling me that all the cameras, gameboys, walkmen, cell phones, PDAs, netbooks etc. that I ever owned were never "mainstream" because of some Apple marketing that doesn't even apply to the 100 million plus portable devices they themselves sold over the last few years. It just doesn't add up. There's nothing inherently wrong with plastic or rubber devices, Apple just doesn't like the associations. They'd rather have titanium that flakes off than plastic that didn't.