Well, as long as they basically keep printing money they'll continue this course.
WE don't like the skeuomorphic stuff (no need for quotes, it's a real word) but the general public does. It demos well and makes software more approachable.
It drives me nuts, but I'll bet it's here to stay. At least until the first video game generations are retirees.
Source? We don't have much data to measure the fondness of end users for skeuomorphic interfaces of the Mac OS sort.
You mentionned some of the reasons to make UIs like that, and of course Apple is selling trunks of devices, but how do we know that users specifically like Calendars, Reminders, the Fullscreen mode of Photobooth, etc. ?
That's just my opinion. How about a quick appeal to authority - I've been deigning and shipping websites for 8 years and am the Online Marketing Manager at my web development agency.
As a more serious attempt to back that opinion up I'd say look at the success of Apple's design in the marketplace over the last 10 years - pinning that exclusively on their love of skeuomorphism would be iffy, though.
Since half of the people buying a Mac is new to Mac, it's safe to say many of them use an iDevice before they use a Mac. It makes sense to give them something familiar by copying some UI elements, especially for things like Calendar when the desktop experience does not need to be different from the mobile experience.
WE don't like the skeuomorphic stuff (no need for quotes, it's a real word) but the general public does. It demos well and makes software more approachable.
It drives me nuts, but I'll bet it's here to stay. At least until the first video game generations are retirees.