Tim Cook was nominated for the CEO position at Apple, Inc. due to the yesterdays Steve Jobs resignation from the position.
He is for a few years now the right arm on Jobs functions and had already take its place in several occasion in the past when Jobs went for surgery and treatment of his pancreatic cancer.
IMHO, Jobs has decided to take his last breath of life with his family and in quality, he may not see 2012, since he is in very advanced state of the disease.
The future of Apple itself may be or not compromised, since even when Tom was in charge, Jobs was ruling the boat in the background, he is known to the last decision on every Apple product making Apple like a son of him.
I'm not really a fan of Apple products, except iPods (the nanos are so effin awesome gadgets), as of today I've only got one, the nano 5g with camera and stuff, pretty nice.
I will forever hate MacOS, its stupid and dumb, I've always qualified it like a bicycle with training wheels.. but the crap is, you can't take the effin wheels out after you know how to ride it.
I fact, for me, the only real computing product and very revolutionary for its time was the NeXT computer, it was also the first webserver in the internet, where the http protocol was designed, at the CERN.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Cook