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There is a real logical difficulty with the argument, and its why there is such nostalgia for PPC. Fact is, you cannot at the same time describe a supplier as "running standard hardware for close to a decade" AND as designing its own hardware. The two are incompatible.

What Apple did with the move to Intel was stop designing hardware, and instead did totally what it had been doing partially for some time: start packaging off the shelf stuff. The result was a real loss of difference, and this is something some Apple customers found very hard to accept. But it was right. The market has voted on the question of unique hardware tied to an OS, and the verdict has been, too expensive for too little if any gain. It turned into difference for its own sake. There really was nothing to be gained from designing your own graphics cards or desktop peripheral interfaces. Or even, latterly, your own main board. You just end up being different for its own sake, at vast expense.

You could see the Intel decision was right as soon as the new towers came out. Where before the interior had been filled with humongous loud cooling, now there was space for extra drives.

Now, do OS and hardware run smoothest when designed by the same people? Don't know of any evidence to that effect on modern hardware, because no-one is doing it any more. On the possibly related point, is there any evidence that OSX runs more smoothly than XP or major flavors of Linux? Don't know of any.

And even if there were, its not clear what it would show. How would you separate out the two possible contributors of OS quality, and quantity of hardware supported, to assign blame or praise properly?

The one thing such evidence could not prove however is that designing the hardware and the OS is better. Because Apple is not doing that, and hasn't for years.