[vor_]

> Hence funding LLVM while starting work on Clang made sense for them, but again not a choice made (purely) on technological merits.

I think it's inaccurate to portray the move away from GCC as simply political with happy side effects, though avoiding the GPL3 was certainly a prime motivation. Greg Parker has stated on Apple developer mailing lists that the adoption of Clang/LLVM has allowed them to rapidly improve the Objective-C language, and that there are more Apple employees working on the language and compiler today than 10 years ago.