I agree locking into a single vendor solution isn’t maybe the best for the end-user in the long-term as it gives the vendor scope to abuse their pricing and position(see: IBM Mainframe, Microsoft etc,), but it does deliver an improved experience (and potentially lower capex/opex) on a sanctioned stack. – which is more important in the corporate world considering infrastructure is likley to be refreshed every 3-5 years?

Moving between vendors is easier the lower down the stack you go (storage/compute/etc.) and virtualization makes this even easier, – no real reasons you couldn’t move onto someone else’s infrastructure stack after that period is up

Further up the stack into the PaaS/SaaS space this is a major re-implementation excercise – this could be the real area of vendor lock-in rather than the infrastructure

One thing I want to note here..

I disagree with your comment that Apple have been so much more successful in the consumer space than Microsoft. You’ve seen market share figures for laptops, and Microsoft have over 90% market share (last figures I can quickly find Oct 2009) .. They are not shabby figures. I suppose you could argue that Apple has been growing faster year on year than there competition. True.

One thing that Apple have in common with Cisco is marketing. They both charge too much for there product, and as such have a lot more $$ to spend on marketing. Its not called the Cisco Markonaut for nothing.

They also lock there own customers in to buying there own products, by using proprietary feature sets. Why would any end user want want to suffer that?? In the long run, it can only be a bad thing to be locked into just ONE vendor.