I don't 100% Agee with the OP, but I do think when Jobs stepped back from Apple and latter passed, The company lost the only person with the authority to edit Jonny Ive. Steve Jobs would have had zero reserve calling out crap design choices. Jonny is an incredibly talented designer, and Steve was great at distilling a product/feature down to it's purest form and the products they worked on together reflect that.
Jonny was definitely the 2nd most important person at Apple after Steve. While I'm sure Tim and team have given Jonny plenty of "Nos," you can bet the effectiveness and outcomes of those conversations is not the same. The Steve Jobs era at Apple is gone, and I doubt we'll see products that live up to that period for a long time. That does not mean the current Apple devices are bad, they are still industry leading but they are not on the same level as what has come before. I think about the Apple products whose designs have made me say Wow on release: G4 Cube, iMac G4 and the iPhone4/4s. That's a long time since something has really stood out