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For the record, I’m not saying that Steve Jobs should cut his ties to Apple, and I realize that speculating about his departure is going to be seen as in bad taste by many people, given his personal health issues. I wish him nothing but the best, and I hope he is around for many years to come. There is no question that Jobs’ vision and laser-like focus on usability and value have worked miracles on Apple’s business model and its share price over the past few years — miracles that many seasoned industry observers never imagined were even possible. So how could not having him around be a good thing for the company? Just stay with me for a minute.

Let me put it this way: While Apple is a successful and widely-admired company with some excellent products, in many ways it is also pretty close to being a cult, as more than one person has argued (with the latest being Dan “Fake Steve Jobs” Lyons, who writes in his recent Newsweek column about how the company is treated with kid gloves by most of the mainstream media). This is hardly surprising, when you think about how low Apple had fallen just a few short years ago. Anyone who can take a company like that and turn it into a market-leading powerhouse with a stock-market value of $75 billion is going to inspire not just admiration but an almost religious devotion.

There’s no question that this has helped Apple immeasurably over the past few years, as it has climbed out of the hole it was in to become a market leader. Devotion to Apple products is so intense that the company has had to do virtually no traditional marketing — or at least very little — nor does it have to focus all that much on crude market instruments such as price. As Apple has started to make the transition from being just a small, niche computer maker into a Sony-style (s SNE) consumer electronics player, however, it has arguably moved beyond where the personal magnetism of Steve Jobs or the passion of Apple acolytes can take it. Not everyone knows the story of how Steve rescued the company, and not everyone is as mesmerized by his keynotes as Apple devotees.

My argument is this: If the company wants to continue expanding its market reach, it needs to move beyond being just an extension of Steve Jobs and his vision. It needs to find other ways to sell itself and its products, apart from just relying on the inherent desire that Apple fans feel for anything that comes out of the company’s Cupertino headquarters and the personal magnetism of its glorious leader. In other words, it needs to grow up.

(read the rest of this post at GigaOm)

Before anyone flames me for not caring about the man or his family, or for prying into what should be personal affairs, or for being “ghoulish” — as someone accused me of being the last time I wrote about the Apple founder’s health — let me just say that I have nothing but respect and admiration for Steve Jobs and what he has done for Apple, and I hope that he gets over his recent health problems and lives a long and happy life. But that doesn’t mean his health, or lack thereof, isn’t of public interest.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again. Kara Swisher and others can argue that his health is no one’s business, and that’s a very sweet sentiment, but it’s just plain wrong. As John Byrne of Business Week noted on Twitter today, there is a premium of anywhere from 15 to 25 per cent built into Apple’s share price because Steve Jobs is the CEO. If he were to disappear, it would remove billions of dollars in market value overnight. If that doesn’t qualify as a “material fact,” then I don’t know what does.

If it’s material, then Apple has to disclose it. And the statement from Jobs is effectively an admission of that. By extension, when the company said he wasn’t sick — and got CNBC to repeat this assertion — it was putting itself at risk of breaching SEC disclosure rules. But now that Steve has come clean everything is settled, right? Hardly. If anything, Apple’s wishy-washy approach to this whole issue over the past few months raises more questions about the company’s credibility than it answers.

Having had a chance to play around with both the iPhone and the iPod Touch, I found them almost irresistible as a quick Web-browsing device while sitting on the couch watching TV or even sitting with friends chatting. To have something a little larger — making images, video and Web pages that much easier to see — but with that touch interface and all of the iPhone apps, would be a pretty killer device I think. And as some have noted in comments on the TechCrunch post, it could be pretty stiff competition for the Amazon Kindle e-reader as well.