The future is the web. And no single company can ever have a monopoly that is strong enough to stand against the combined work of humanity.

You are too narrowly focused on the app store. As Apple fucks things up more and more (see e.g maps, which Jobs would never have allowed) and with the new Nexus 7 coming out the future of computability is only going to go one way -- HTML5 will become more and more powerful, Javascript interpretators is going to become better, faster and leaner, and Android Tablets are going to be better and better.

But even if we assume Apple is always going to reign supreme for all eternity (and honestly, has any company ever done that?), they allow you to install any 'app' of the internet. It is available on the little icon next to the browser bar and you can develop these apps on a windows PC, if you want. No license, no control, more freedom than you ever had with MS and much easier to get started too.