Re: Kudos to Apple…
It seems that Apple wanted to sell a product - a pad that simultaneously charged a phone, watchband earbuds - that nobody else could make. This convenience would have been its unique selling point, and without that most users would be just as well served by a 3rd party Qi charging mat by Belkin, Logitech, Samsung, Xiaomi etc al, and there would be no room for Apple to put a good margin on the price tag.
The very difficulty that would have given Apple a USP has proved in fact to have prevented Apple from achieving it.
The announcement of the pad was premature but this is hardly unprecedented... it was touch and go that the first iPhone Steve Jobs announced on stage would get through the presentation without crashing. He took a punt that the bugs would be ironed out between the announcement and the release date, and the punt paid off.
Apple must have had a few teams working on wireless charging. They were late to join the Qi standard party because they had been attempting to create a better system (i.e, charging over a greater distance) and had failed.