It's a mistake to lump the rest of his response under "platitudes." What he's saying there-work backwards from the customer experience rather than forwards from the tech-is the strategy that took Apple from bankrupt to $2 trillion. Technical people dismiss it all the time. If the technology is better, the thinking goes, it will win out eventually. It's the thought process that launched the Zune, Windows Phone, and decades of attempts at tablets. Apple's entire existence is predicated on letting other "clever" companies try this and torpedoing them with worse but vastly more usable versions of their advanced technology.
It was both. Apple would never have succeeded without great engineers. I think he's downplaying the role that technology plays here to emphasise his point. What Apple/Steve did really well was to understand their market really well and channel technical efforts towards that and carefully curate the results. Another aspect that's often not noticed is how costs were managed on the other side. For instance to this day Apple doesn't support blue ray because it would deliver limited value but add to their bottom line. Similarly how they aggressively eliminated optical disks when they got the chance.
