Apple is the new Apple. This is the way Apple has always been. Apple is the original closed box consumer platform. It's part of the company's DNA, if there is such a thing. The only difference is that now they also control the distribution channel, not just the hardware/OS.
I think that's stretching the point. The Apple II was certainly not closed. Literally the whole design of the thing was cleanly documented, right down the IC selection and the (hand assembled!) firmware. The original Mac was likewise an open book (albeit one without an expansion bus). Take a look at the first edition of Inside Macintosh. Even modern macs aren't "closed" in any meaningful sense. You can develop and deploy software for them using most or all of the tools Apple has internally.
And in any case, it's not the "closedness" that people are complaining about with regard to the iPhone; that's just the practical tool Apple is using. The complaint is about Apple's attempts to use dominance in one sector (smartphones in this case, though I think a similar argument can be made about media players and iTunes) as leverage against competitors or to favor its own products, or those of its allies.
And it is that behavior that seems very Microsoft-like to those of us who remember the 90's.
"Apple is the new Microsoft" is just more easily sold way of saying "Apple is the new Evil(TM)".
Microsoft has been a horizontal monopoly. Apple has large horizontal and vertical reach but has cleverly avoided being a monopoly of either sort. This doesn't mean Apple hasn't been evil but at least when Apple is evil, there's an alternative...
