While I can understand the issue the change creates for the author, a nexus between the emacs interface and Apple's overall user experience philosophy would appear to be somewhat hard to find.
I nearly got a guy on the MPW Shell team fired -- I was egging him on to add keyboard macros to MPW (the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop), and he eventually did. They were powerful enough to emulate at least a top-level mostly Emacs environment.
Oh, the fur flew. Post-facto, managers piled on and tried to make the feature more Mac-like. It was fine as it stood. It was amusing to watch.
Also, Apple is one strange company. A friend who worked there as a contractor told me that there were two Perl teams there, working in different buildings. He organized a lunch so that the two teams could meet each other. After someone higher up found out, that was the end of his contract. Apparently there is so much secrecy that even teams working on bullshit HR apps (or the equivalent) can't even have lunch together.
Apple is a cult. Follow the rules or you go to hell.
Once it was in there, they didn't roll it back for some reason -- probably because a lot of folks secretly liked the feature and killing it would have been politically difficult. So the User Interface people (why you have these on a command shell is beyond me) were given a chance to pee in the feature for a bit, until they liked the flavor, and it shipped. My cow-orker got into some hot water.
