Why do the big "guns" get more credits for their technical skills then they might deserve?
They… don’t?
Steve Jobs was never a tech wizard, nor did he (or anyone else) claim he was. What he was was a visionary: someone who could see the technology that exists, or was on the horizon, and envision how to put it to use. It’s very, very unlikely the computer industry would have developed in the direction it did, when it did, without Jobs. He’s the one who saw a (rudimentary) GUI and thought “everyone should have this on their desk” back when that was a preposterous idea. He’s the one who recognized that a really good finger-driven touchscreen could work as the sole input device on a phone, back when that idea, too, was considered preposterous. Another thing Jobs excelled at (though admittedly with often questionable methods) was pushing the engineers to accomplish the “impossible”. Of course, it was not actually impossible, since they did it, but they routinely did things that were considered too difficult to be practical, or under otherwise unrealistic timelines. Jobs had a sense of taste (i.e. appreciation for quality and style) and understanding of design (especially visual arts and industrial design) that permeates Apple to this day and fundamentally shaped the electronics industry today. One more thing Jobs was was an advocate for the user: he didn’t like things that were hard to use, and he was a mostly-effective foil to Jony Ive’s insane drive for extreme minimalism. (We saw what happened when Ive became the head of software design and every visual affordance vanished...) Was Steve Jobs the only person to possess his abilities? No. But having all of those in one person is very, very, very rare.
(As for Xerox: they didn’t invent the GUI either, though they developed the first commercially available GUI-based system. However, it’s categorically incorrect to say, as is often parroted, that Jobs “copied” it: while his visit to Xerox is what exposed him to the
concept of the GUI, the actual GUI Apple went on to develop and sell has essentially nothing in common with Xerox’s GUI — the similarities pretty much end at them both using a bitmap display, a mouse, and having on-screen things to point at. Nothing else works the same, and if you or I sat down at a Xerox Alto, we would not know how to operate it. The interactions are radically different from what we use today. Apple’s GUI, on the other hand, became the model upon which ALL the modern mouse-driven GUIs were based. All of the basic interaction patterns we take for granted — click a thing, drag it or select a command to apply to it — were what Apple, not Xerox, came up with. I’m sure their researchers looked at all the prior art that existed at the time, but they came up with something unlike anything before it. The only real exceptions to the standard Mac/Windows interaction models are CAD software, and that’s because a lot of it predates the Mac. So many of them use the verb->noun (choose command, then choose what to apply it to) interaction model that was common in extremely early graphical software, rather than the noun->verb (select item, then do something to it) model that is prevalent in most software today.)
As for Woz: his skill was in accomplishing the same thing using a lot simpler hardware, thus making it more affordable. A famous example of this was the Apple II disk controller, which (combined with strategically offloading of some controller logic to the software) had more functionality using 8 ICs than IBM’s disk controller that used 50 chips!