I am absolutely open to being corrected but I can't think of a single current era FOSS project that apple is optimizing and shipping with their computers.

The local ai is used by Apple services, mostly. Though there is a Swift SDK to access it, apparently.

The product marketing managers write for the target audience; of course they know lots of people buying these are the local LLM crowd.

I actually wouldn't want a serious model shipping 'on disk'. Models release so often, it's going to get outdated quickly. LMStudio is trivial to set up.