This is a nice thought, but I don't think it's realistic. Most of Apple's value comes from refining the work of others. They didn't invent the computer, the music player, or the phone, they just made great versions of each of these things. I'd argue that Apple couldn't exist at all if they paid everyone who's work influenced them. They'd have to give away everything.
I'm being easy on Apple by talking about hardware items, I know. Apple's worst sins are when they rip off software. And it's frustrating how sometimes they'll buy it (Coverflow) and sometimes they won't (Watson). The way they go about it feels mean. But it just shows how competitive they are. Ruthless even. They'd rather play dirty and win than lose with honor. It's hard to stay mad at them though because they do it all with such good taste.
A dongle? I understand why it's necessary for the pressure sensitivity and being able to draw fine lines, but it seems like a drag. I hope they release the app with support for regular touch input, it looks good.
I don't want to talk for Chris Granger, but my intuition tells me that the features you listed are things he considers to be the baseline for a modern editor and are not the true reason he's building Light Table. I think his goals are more about making a real product with the capabilities of the demo IDE Bret Victor showed in his Inventing on Principle talk https://vimeo.com/36579366 Eclipse is nowhere near this today, and perhaps it never will be. I'm backing Light Table because I think Chris has a shot of getting there.
Sublime is nice, and would probably be the best choice if you were choosing your first text editor. If you are coming from TextMate, it depends on your situation. Sublime is faster, it has a nice always-on, miniaturized preview of your whole document, and it has tremendous momentum in the developer community. I'm primarily a designer who writes JS and CSS, and, so far, Sublime's benefits don't outweigh the arduousness of committing different keyboard shortcuts to muscle memory. So, I have both installed, but I still use TM primarily. My good friend, who is a much better programmer than I, prefers Sublime. He is a fast learner and so his "switching cost" for new editors is relatively low.
I think that cmd actually was designed so that it wouldn't collide with ctrl. If you look at the keyboard for the Apple II, it had a ctrl key, and I believe it was used for control characters. On later keyboards, they introduced the open apple key (ancestor of command) while retaining the ctrl key. Apple manufactured their own keyboards, so it was relatively easy for them to have separate keys for control characters and keyboard shortcuts. Microsoft on the other hand, did not have this luxury. They were inclined to base their software around existing keyboards, and so they co-opted the ctrl key for shortcuts.
One cool thing I learned while researching this is that Emacs-style keybindings work in TextEdit or any native OS X text area.
^A go to beginning of line
^E end of line
^L center line vertically
^K kut (cuts text till end of the line and stores it in a separate buffer from the clipboard)
^Y yank (pastes from the kut buffer)
^D forward delete
(^ = Ctrl)
I'm being easy on Apple by talking about hardware items, I know. Apple's worst sins are when they rip off software. And it's frustrating how sometimes they'll buy it (Coverflow) and sometimes they won't (Watson). The way they go about it feels mean. But it just shows how competitive they are. Ruthless even. They'd rather play dirty and win than lose with honor. It's hard to stay mad at them though because they do it all with such good taste.