Even the ex CEO of Apple admited that motorola was a mistake.

[lsmart]

T
It's only now, with the Core i7 series.. that Intel processors have began having built-in GPU,

He was most probably thinking of MMX. But Apples problem in the 90s wasn´t the PowerPC. They were selling more than a dozen different models at the same time, so choosing the right one wasn´t easy and more importantly: they sold a lot of 68x00 boxes too and even those were more than twice as expensive as an similary specd Pentium.
Oh and maybe PCs even had a better OS: OS/2.

[lsmart]

So how come Apple didn't fracture into two camps

They did twice: first NeXT, later BeOS. But only the main branch survived. Well ... you could argue that NeXT survived and BeOS isn´t entirely dead.

If you look for some programming options on Apple you will find empty forums and clueless people on the other end of a Apple store phone.

You asked a sales guy about programming? There are a lot of develloper resouces for Mac and iPhone. You can easily get advice on the mailing lists (even sometimes stuff that is still under NDA, but don´t count on that). Remember though that Apples platform isn´t about choice: Cocoa is king for them. Oh, and et´s hope they don´t sue MUI for patent infringement.