It sounds "oxymoronic", but...
The downside of that is that it makes life harder for competition, which ultimately could slow-down innovation, so more competition for Canon is a good thing for us all.
Bart
For one thing, I am in full agreement with Canon's approach, which is nothing else that using, valuing and protecting your brain as your main and most treasured competitive weapon. I *love* this approach, in general, from an personal all the way to organizational level. Ingenuity, creativity, that ability to conceptualize and build stuff out of thin air, is what NO ONE can take away from you.
On one side, yes, macro-economics tells the competitivie/choice-range story, but, on the other hand, it is also because the PILE of cash, effort and brains invested by Canon that we have a product like the 1D Mark III (as an example, as you have others as well out-there). Canon is already years ahead of Nikon in some fronts (years means anything over 12 months), and they seem to keep pushing and pushing, even if there is no-one close enough in the rear-view mirror.
So it is hard to take a single stance here... It is kind of a different story with, say, Microsoft/Windows... I *know*, by fact, that Windows is nowhere close to be about engineering "excellence", "blistering" performance, or anything like that... it is just the product of a well-grounded competitive strategy that has pretty much dominated the landscape with a relatively unreliable, sometimes unpredictable and difficult to scale product.
I do not know what awaits for us in VISTA, for instance (that is, I am not really sure if it is better or not, if it is more stable or not, indeed). There is large contrast here, and Microsoft did have competition along the way... but the difference is that it was determined to swallow the world, in a single bite, and with a lot less patents than Canon...
Just my 0.02.