[sjwright]

I also side with them as a consumer who frequently connects cables to devices, and therefore knows that micro-usb sucks balls.

If I was an Apple shareholder I would have wanted them to stick with the 30 pin connector; as much as Lightning should greatly improve usability, Apple have so much marketplace inertia stored in the 30 pin accessory market, and they're going to lose all of it overnight.

See that awesome fancy speaker dock? Chances are it's got a 30 pin connector on it. That's not going to be the case in 18 months. And I bet less than half of the speaker dock market is Lightning by then; the rest will be neither.