That's only because there are no other vendors to muddy the meaning of "pure". Only one vendor of devices for the OS means only one conception about what "pure iOS" means. It doesn't necessarily mean that Apple's conception of iOS is the best possible conception of iOS.

So if you can choose between pure and not pure, locked vs unlocked, is worse? Interesting selling point

For some of us, having a locked down, reliable, secure, and pure phone is a great solution.

I don’t want iOS on my random experimental project laptop, for that I have Linux or windows, or vms. But, cellphones are not something I need to hack around on.

their point is that you can choose to have "pure" android or "unpure" - which is not an option apple provides. why is that worse?

Because "unpure" Android barely receives updates and the few occasions where it does, it's extremely delayed. So that's pretty "worse"

You can also choose to jailbreak an Apple device if you really want to be unpure, and luckily doing so won't prevent you from updating your phone in the future.

>cellphones are not something I need to hack around on.

Different strokes for different folks. I like having the ability to sideload apps and flash a different OS to my phone