They popularised rather than created them, I had had two before the iPods ever came out.
I will say with the Nano models in particular they moved things up in the market considerably. But without the iPod brand I do not think they would have taken off like they did.
And even with Lossless they could have gone down the FLAC route but had to make their own version that was not adopted anywhere else for a long time. As someone that has owned Apple equipment for around 20 years some of their walled garden thinking annoys me enough that I do not use their services on their products.
But Apple TV, an area that they have to go outside their walled garden (and Apple Music) are both good services, because they cannot afford to drive lock-in and because of that they build better services.