The irony is that the determination and singlemindedeness he showed over so many other things was a key contributor to his death: he ignored the advice to get medical treatment for too long. That contributed directly to his early death.
There was a lot of controversy, some of it around the time of Jobs' death, about the conditions of the factories in China that were making Apple products. Did you intentionally not reference that... or maybe I missed it?
The China factories thing is interesting, but more for what it tells us about how PR and image works than other stuff. I did have quite a lot of stuff about supply chains and the first iPhone in an early draft (how Apple was far behind in the supply chain system for phones, because it was a newcomer). But that had to be cut for length.
What I really wanted to focus on was the narrative of the struggle between the three companies. When Apple was tiny, and making Macs and iPods, nobody ever thought about their factories, or the conditions in them. (Then-)bigger companies such as HP and Dell were getting their PCs made by the million in factories in China — still are. But you don't read about conditions there, or what they're getting paid; Nick Bilton of the New York Times did try asking them after the Apple/China stuff blew up a few months ago, and they simply didn't reply.
Now: I was focusing on the narrative of the struggle between the companies. How the phones get manufactured isn't actually central to that picture. You could probably look at RIM's or Nokia's or LG's or Motorola's or — who knows? — even Samsung's factories and contractors and make similar cases and ask similar questions.
But those don't tell you anything at all about why consumers choose, or chose, one brand over another. To an extent, we in the west have a certain wilful blindness to how our goods and food is made; we don't want to know about the path from cow to beefburgers, and we'd like our new objects to have sprung into existence replete with that new gadget smell, rather than have involved what we'd view as cruel and unusual punishment with a bit of pay sprinkled on top.
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