Tomorrow’s crisis today: Apple’s (AAPL) critics haven’t yet realized that the iPhone App Store has fueled millions in software development efforts to produce content exclusively tied to the company’s proprietary Cocoa Touch mobile platform. Is this a credible threat, and what is Apple’s real motive behind its iTunes rich media content strategy?

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The biggest news to come out of iPhone 3.0 is its new support for external peripherals, a move that will expand the iPhone and its iPod touch sibling into new territory as a central hub for controlling all sorts of embedded devices. It will also bring Apple’s (AAPL) new mobile platform even closer to the open-ended premise of the old Newton Message Pad. Here’s why Apple’s modern mobile platform will work out better than its first attempt in the early 90s, and why competitors will be hard pressed to duplicate its success.

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There’s nothing new about mobile computing. In the early ’90s, the industry promised a range of devices, from tablets to mini-laptops to smaller handheld PDAs. Apple’s (AAPL) pioneering offering, the 1993 Newton Message Pad, sought to deliver a sophisticated new operating system and development environment running a unique new platform based upon low-power, ARM RISC processors the company co-developed with Acorn.

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