The technical and policy morass surrounding CableCARD is keeping innovative technology companies out of the market for set-top boxes (STBs). Need evidence? Here's Steve Jobs at D5, quoted at Engadget:
The minute you have an STB you have gnarly issues, CableCARD, OCAP… that just isn't something we would choose to do ourselves.
It's surprising that the CEO of a non-cable company even knows what OCAP is. Maybe they considered and rejected the idea of creating a full-fledged set-top box? A company like Apple wants to have complete control over the user experience. Inferior, non-solutions like OCAP that are designed to limit consumer choice and cripple third-party hardware manufacturers not only make it so that the products that do come to market are inferior. They prevent great things from even being created in the first place.