Apple already has been offering iPod games since 2005, and they will sooner or later start offering games for the iPhone/iPod Touch and the Apple TV as well. I don't think they will offer a dedicated games machine though.
In that way, they are not a new kind of threat for video games. The computer game market has existed next to the video game market for decades, and mobile phone games are getting more and more popular every year without squeezing out handheld video games.
Gaming will be a part of every new entertainment platform companies will try to establish over the next decades. At least so far, the dedicated video game system could hold their own. It remains to be seen what will happen in the future.
regarding open standards,
Both the Apple Pippin (which was a platform, not a console. Apple never sold Pippin hardware.) and the 3DO (a platform developed by EA founder Trip Hawkins) were designed as open standards systems. They were too expensive and not powerful enough to overcome the proprietary systems of their time. They both flopped.
If MS, Sony and Nintendo would ever agree to give up their exlusive hardware and put out a common standard this would be the end of dedicated video game systems, because other general-purpose devices would integrate those features.
Hardcore gaming is a bubble economy blown up by Microsoft's $7 $6 billion losses.
